Aiming at shortcomings of traditional image retrieval systems,a new image retrieval approach based on color features of image combining intuitive fuzzy theory with genetic algorithm is proposed.Each image is segmented into a constant number of sub-images in vertical direction.Color features are extracted from every sub-image to get chromosome coding.It is considered that fuzzy membership and intuitive fuzzy hesitancy degree of every pixels color in image are associated to all the color histogram bins.Certain feature,fuzzy feature and intuitive fuzzy feature of colors in an image,are used together to describe the content of image.Efficient combinations of sub-image are selected according to operation of selecting,crossing and variation.Retrieval resuits are obtained from image matching based on these color feature combinations of sub-images.Tests show that this approach can improve the accuracy of image retrieval in the case of not decreasing the speed of image retrieval.Its mean precision is above 80%.