The MPEG-7 standard is emerging as both a general framework for content description and a collection of specific, agreed-upon content descriptors. We have developed a neural, self-organizing technique for content-based image retrieval. In this paper, we apply the visual content descriptors provided by MPEG-7 in our PicSOM system and compare our own image indexing technique with a reference method based on vector quantization. The results of our experiments show that the MPEG-7 descriptors can be used as such in the PicSOM system.