There exists an enormous gap between low-level visual feature and high-level semantic information, and the accuracy of content-based image classification and retrieval depends greatly on the description of low-level visual features. Taking this into consideration, a novel texture and edge descriptor is proposed in this paper, which can be represented with a histogram. Furthermore, with the incorporation of the color, texture and edge histograms seamlessly, the images are grouped into semantic classes using a support vector machine (SVM). Experiment results show that the combination descriptor is more discriminative than other feature descriptors such as Gabor texture.