This paper presents a novel compact description of a pattern based on the interference of circular waves. The proposed approach, called " interference description " , leads to a representation of the pattern , where the spatial relations of its constituent parts are intrinsically taken into account. Due to the intrinsic characteristics of the interference phenomenon, this description includes more information than a simple sum of individual parts. Therefore it is suitable for representing the interrelations of different pattern components. We illustrate that the proposed description satisfies some of the key Gestalt properties of human perception such as invariance, emergence and reification, which are also desirable for efficient pattern description. We further present a method for matching the proposed interference descriptions of different patterns. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our description for several computer vision tasks such as pattern recognition, shape matching and retrieval.