Recent advances in multimedia has necessitated us to look for an effective search method of images. Most of the contemporary indexing methods are based on color distribution in the images. When the users do not remember the colors clearly, however, it has been difficult to retrieve the desired images. The paper proposes an indexing method based on shapes contained in an image. We characterize an image by the half planes that contain the objects in it. We also propose a method to characterize images by the vanishing points of parallel lines contained in an image. The vanishing points represent how three dimensional (3D) objects are projected onto the 2D image.