As the Gabor filters are direction dependent, the Gabor transform of an image is to be performed for all chosen directions. Thus the set of angles used in Gabor feature extraction does affect the results in applications such as Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). In the present work, we modify the Gabor filter suitably in such a way that the modified function besides being free from the choice of angles is as effective as the Gabor function itself. Additionally, our method of extraction of features is invariant to rotation in images. Our simulation results demonstrate that the modified Gabor based method being useful for CBIR shows better retrieval performance than the standard Gabor based method. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.