In this paper we propose a new approach to shape recognition based on the wavelet transform modulus maxima. And apply it to the problem of content-based indexing and retrieval of fish contours. The description scheme and the similarity measure developed take into consideration the way our visual system perceives objects and compares them.The proposed scheme is invariant to translation, rotation, scale change and to noise corruption. Moreover, this description scheme allows accurate reconstruction of the shape boundary from the feature vector used to describe it. The experimental results and comparisons show the performance of the proposed technique.