Abstract  In this paper, a general bit-plane representation method is presented to achieve effective scalable representation for vector descriptors. Conventional vector descriptors are represented by a sequence of scalar elements and the scalability can be achieved by changing the number of elements. The proposed method represents the vector descriptors by a sequence of bit-planes that are obtained by grouping the values at the same bit positions of all the elements. In this method, the scalability is achieved by changing the number of the bit-planes. We applied the proposed scalability feature to the MPEG-7 texture descriptor and show that the performance of the proposed representation is significantly better than that of conventional representations in terms of retrieval accuracy and stability with a coarse representation.