Individual Chinese characters are identified mainly by their skeleton structure instead of texture or color.In this paper, an approach based on skeleton similarity for Chinese calligraphic characters retrieval is proposed.By this approach,first,the skeleton of the binarized individual characters are acquired by an improved multi-level module analysis algorithm.Second,the first round of skeleton matching based on the invariant moment-descriptor guarantees the recall rate;the second round of skeleton matching based on the comprehensive characteristic difference in the polar coordinates system guarantees the retrieval precision.Finally,different styles of the same Chinese characters are ranked and displayed according to the two rounds of matching score.Besides,the efficiency of our approach is manifested by the preliminary experiment.