Abstract- A generic shape descriptor, which can be extracted from the major object edges in an automatic way and used for the content-based retrieval in multimedia databases, is presented. Via adopting a multi-scale approach over the edge field where the scale represents the amount of simplification, the most relevant edge segments, as we refer to subsegments, which eventually represent the major object boundaries, are extracted from a scale-map. Adopted from an imaginary concept of a walking ant with a limited line of sight over the boundary of a particular object, we traverse through each sub-segment and describe a certain line of sight, whether it is a continuous branch or a corner, using individual 2D histograms. As a result integrating the whole process as feature extraction module into MUVIS framework allows us to test the mutual performance of the proposed shape descriptor in the context of multimedia indexing and retrieval. 1.