In this paper, we propose an edge histogram to efficiently represent the edge distribution in the image for MPEG-7. To this end, we adopt global, semi-global, and local edge histogram bins. Also, we extract the edge information from the image in terms of image blocks rather than pixels, which reduces the extraction complexity and is also applicable to the block-based compression standards such as MPEG-1, and 2. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields better retrieval accuracy and feature extraction speed comparing to other non-homogeneous texture descriptors of MPEG-7 including the wavelet-based descriptor and local edge-based descriptor.