Abstract: Photometric invariance is a desired property for color image descriptors. It ensures that the description has a certain robustness with respect to scene incidental variations such as changes in viewpoint, object orientation, and illuminant color. A drawback of photometric invariance is that the discriminative power of the description reduces while increasing the photometric invariance. In this paper, we look into the use of color names for the purpose of image description. Color names are linguistic labels that humans attach to colors. They display a certain amount of photometric invariance, and as an additional advantage allow the description of the achromatic colors, which are undistinguishable in a photometric invariant representation. Experiments on an image classification task show that color description based on color names outperforms description based on photometric invariants.