Shape is a very important attribute of objects

and it plays an important role in image retrieval.Pyramid of histogram of orientation gradients (PHOG) is a powerful expressive description of object shapes.But it has a poor performance in searching images with a nature background.The distribution of image energy field among different frequency domains can be obtained by wavelet decomposition

so the wavelet character can be used in image retrieval.In this paper

a new wavelet pyramid energy distribution character is extracted from images

and is dynamically combined with PHOG character in an image retrieval framework based on SVM classifier.Experiments on a Corel image subset show that our method has a better effect than methods only using PHOG shape description character or wavelet pyramid energy distribution character.