In this paper a novel statistical shape feature called the Contour Co-occurrence Matrix (CCM) is proposed for image classification and retrieval. The CCM indicates the joint probability of contour directions in a chain code representation of an object's contour. Comparisons are conducted between different versions of the CCM and several other shape descriptors from e.g. the MPEG-7 standard. Experiments are run with two defect image databases. The results show that the CCM can efficiently represent and classify the difficult, irregular shapes that different defects possess.