The on-line image retrieval process consists of a query example image, given by the user as an input, from which low-level image features are extracted. These image features are used to find images in the database which are most similar to the query image. A drawback, however, is that these low level image features are often too restricted to describe images on a conceptual or semantic level. The gap between the high level query from the user and low level features extracted by a computer is known as the semantic gap. Translating or converting the question posed by a human to the low level features seen by the computer illustrates the problem in bridging the semantic gap. This paper proposes a novel fuzzy approach for mapping the fuzzy database while extracting the colour features from image and assigning the weights to this fuzzy content when calculating the similarity between the query image and the images in database. Number of experiments was conducted on a small colour image database and promising results were obtained. © 2007 IEEE.