Abstract: Automatic description of cultural features of buildings and building retrieval is of great pratical interest for a number of applications such as automatic navigation and position system. Traditional methods ignore important structure information of buildings. In this paper we present a novel strategy to the problem of navigating through a database of buildings based on salience detection. With our proposed approach,the related structure information is first extracted using salience detection. And then we use a mo-dified EMD method to measure the distance of structure information we acquired for our final navigation. The experiment result indicates that our presented strategy is effective and efficient.