Digital color images are now one of the most popular data types used in the digital processing environment. Color image recognition plays an important role in many vital applications, which makes the enhancement of image recognition or retrieval system an important issue. Using color image pixels to recognize or retrieve the image, but the issue of the huge color image size that requires accordingly more time and memory space to perform color image recognition and/or retrieval. In the current study, image local contrast was used to create local contrast victor, which was then used as a key to recognize or retrieve the image. The proposed local contrast method was properly implemented and tested. The obtained results proved its efficiency as compared with other methods.