Dominant color descriptor (DCD) is one of the color descriptors proposed by MPEG-7 that has been extensively used for image retrieval. Among the color descriptors, DCD describes the salient color distributions in an image or a region of interest. DCD provides an effective, compact, and intuitive representation of colors presented in an image. In this paper, we will develop an efficient scheme for dominant color extraction. This approach significantly improves the efficiency of computation for dominant color extraction. In addition, we propose a modification for the MPEG-7 dissimilarity measure, which effectively improves the accuracy of perceptive similarity. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves performance improvement not only in saving features extraction cost but also perceptually similar image retrieval.