A new image retrieval method based on enhanced micro-structure and context-sensitive similarity was proposed to overcome the shortcoming of high dimension of combined image feature and intangible combined weights. A new local pattern map was firstly used to create filter map, and then enhanced micro-structure descriptor was extracted based on color co-occurrence relationship. The descriptor combined several features with the same dimension as single color feature. Based on the extracted descriptor, normal distance between image pairs was calculated and sorted. Combined with the iterative context-sensitive similarity, the initial sorted image series were re-ranked. With setting the value of iteration times as 50 and considering the top 24 images in the retrieved image set, the comparative experiments with Multi-Texton Histogram (MTH) and Micro-Structure Descriptor (MSD) show that the retrieval precisions of the proposed algorithm respectively are increased by 13.14% and 7.09% on Corel-5000 image set and increased by 11.03% and 6.8% on Corel-10000 image set. By combining several features and using context information while keeping dimension unchanged, the new method can enhance the precision effectively.