In this paper, we propose a similarity search algorithm for image databases. One of the central problems regarding content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is the semantic gap between the low-level features computed automatically from images and the human interpretation of image content. Many search algorithms used in CBIR have used the Minkowski metric (or $L_p$-norm) to measure similarity between image pairs. However those functions cannot adequately capture the aspects of the characteristics of the human visual system as well as the nonlinear relationships in contextual information. Our new search algorithm tackles this problem by employing new similarity measures and ranking strategies that reflect the nonlinearity of human perception and contextual information. Our search algorithm yields superior experimental results on a real handwritten digit image database and demonstrates its effectiveness.