A Mahalanobis distance measure is used to identify a query image among plural images in a database. The measure may be used to rank the similarity of one or more images to the query image. A variance-covariance matrix is calculated for all images in the database. The variance-covariance matrix is used to calculate the Mahalanobis distance between the query image and one or more images in the database. A range tree may be used to identify likely image candidates for performing the Mahalanobis distance measurement.