A content-based image retrieval method using color, texture, and shape features is proposed in this paper. A region segmentation technique using PIM(Picture Information Measure) entropy is used for similarity indexing. For segmentation, a color image is first transformed to a gray image and it is divided into n$ imes$n non-overlapping blocks. Entropy using PIM is obtained from each block. Adequate variance to perform good segmentation of images in the database is obtained heuristically. As variance increases up to some bound, objects within the image can be easily segmented from the background. Therefore, variance is a good indication for adequate image segmentation. For high variance image, the image is segmented into two regions-high and low entropy regions. In high entropy region, hue-saturation-intensity and canny edge histograms are used for image similarity calculation. For image having lower variance is well represented by global texture information. Experiments show that the proposed method displayed similar images at the average of 4th rank for top-10 retrieval case.