Abstract An algorithm of dominant color extraction in DGT domain based on MPEG7 is described in this paper, which proposes an efficient and fast method to extract the dominant color feature from the compressed bit streams. As a part of the algorithm, a method for automatic determination of threshold is proposed too. The proposed algorithm is based on JPEG standard and some statistical parameters of DCT coefficients. Experimental results of comparison show that the proposed algorithm is effective and fast in dominant color extraction. A target application is similar retrieval in compressed image database or Internet via this proposed algorithm.