Abstract: This paper presents an image retrieval system based on 2D shape information. Query shape objects and database images are repre- sented by polygonal approximations of their contours. Afterwards they are encoded, using geometric features, in terms of predefined structures. Shapes are then located in database images by a voting procedure on the spatial domain. Then an alignment matching provides a probability value to rank de database image in the retrieval result. The method al- lows to detect a query object in database images even when they contain complex scenes. Also the shape matching tolerates partial occlusions and affine transformations as translation, rotation or scaling.