MPEG‐7 Visual Standard specifies a set of descriptors that can be used to measure similarity in images or video. Among them, the Edge Histogram Descriptor describes edge distribution with a histogram based on local edge distribution in an image. Since the Edge Histogram Descriptor recommended for the MPEG‐7 standard represents only local edge distribution in the image, the matching performance for image retrieval may not be satisfactory. This paper proposes the use of global and semi‐local edge histograms generated directly from the local histogram bins to increase the matching performance. Then, the global, semiglobal, and local histograms of images are combined to measure the image similarity and are compared with the MPEG‐7 descriptor of the local‐only histogram. Since we exploit the absolute location of the edge in the image as well as its global composition, the proposed matching method can retrieve semantically similar images. Experiments on MPEG‐7 test images show that the proposed method yields better retrieval performance by an amount of 0.04 in ANMRR, which shows a significant difference in visual inspection.