Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems have been developed to support the image retrieval based on image properties, such as color, shape and texture. In this paper, we are concerned with shape-based image retrieval. In this context, we propose a method to describe shapes based on salience points. The proposed descriptor utilizes a salience detector which is robust to noise, and an elastic matching algorithm to measure the similarity between two shapes represented by their salience points. The proposed approach is robust to noise and gives good results in recognizing shapes of the same class, even if they are represented by a different number of salience points.