The images involved in the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) applications are collectively represented by features such as color, texture and shape. The precision of the CBIR application relies on the key features used in image representation and its similarity measure. In CBIR, dominant color feature extraction is affected by the predefined intervals used in color quantization. The proposed work mainly concentrates on extracting the dominant color information of the image using the clustering process. The clustering process is initiated by the proposed seed point's selection approach. This approach derives the number of seed points using the first order statistical measure and maximum range of the distributed pixel values. Moreover, this work gives equal priority to dominant color and its occurrence information in calculating the similarity between query and database images. Finally, the standard databases such as SIMPLIcity, Corel-10k, OT-scene, Oxford flower and GHIM are taken to investigate the performance of the proposed dominant color based image retrieval application. © 2019 The British Computer Society 2019. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.