Cow image processing technique would be useful not only for recognizing an individual but also for establishing the image database and analyzing the shape of cows. A cow (Holstein) has usually the unique speckle pattern. In this study, the individual recognition of cow was carried out using the speckle pattern and the content-based image retrieval technique. Sixty cow images of 16 heads were captured under outdoor illumination, which were complicated images due to shadow, obstacles and walking posture of cow. Sixteen images were selected as the reference image for each cow and 44 query images were used for evaluating the efficiency of individual recognition by matching to each reference image. Run-lengths and positions of runs across speckle area were calculated from 40 horizontal line profiles for ROI (region of interest) in a cow body image after 3 passes of 5$ imes$5 median filtering. A similarity measure for recognizing cow individuals was calculated using Euclidean distance of normalized G-frame histogram (GH). normalized speckle run-length (BRL), normalized x and y positions (BRX, BRY) of speckle runs. This study evaluated the efficiency of individual recognition of cow using Recall(Success rate) and AVRR(Average rank of relevant images). Success rate of individual recognition was 100% when GH, BRL, BRX and BRY were used as image query indices. It was concluded that the histogram as global property and the information of speckle runs as local properties were good image features for individual recognition and the developed system of individual recognition was reliable.