A new color-based image retrieval method is proposed in the paper. The quantization precision of this algorithm is higher than that of supervised method and its efficiency well than unsupervised way. First, through the distance-matrix of color, the sample image is clustered in a self-organizing way, thus its palette can be obtained. Based on the palette, other images in the database are mapped in terms of min-distance. In this way, a uniform histogram according to the same palette can be obtained for each image in the database. Besides, this algorithm also combines the main color area to represent the spatial distribution of color. The experiments show that the method can gain very good experimental results which match human visual percept well.