The paper presents an adaptive Hilbert-scan based method for image retrieval that addresses the limitations of the traditional bag-of-features model, particularly its lack of spatial information. By employing a novel hierarchical strategy to automatically select scanning paths based on interest point distribution, the method enhances retrieval accuracy, as demonstrated through experiments on the Caltech-256 dataset. The proposed method, termed adaptive Hilbert-scan based bag-of-features (ahs-bof), shows significant improvements over existing techniques in terms of performance.