Abstract: Improvement of both speed and accuracy is an important problem in the retrieval system based on curve matching.We proposed a partial matching algorithm for planar curves.The algorithm include two steps,global search and local matching.We first use the global search for determining,the candidate partial matches,then improve matching accuracy results by the local matching.For curves with few feature points,we divide each curve into several curve segments according to curvature maxima and make use of a local linear search algorithm find the partial matches.Experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient than existing methods.