Chain codes were developed for storing contour information for shape matching. The traditional chain codes are highly susceptible to small perturbations in the contours of the objects. Therefore, traditional chain codes could not be used for image retrieval based on the shape boundaries from the large databases. In this paper, a histogram based chain codes are proposed which could be used for image retrieval. The proposed chain codes are invariant to translation, rotation and scaling transformations, and have high immunity to noise and small perturbations.