Working with large collections of videos and images has need of effective and flexible techniques of retrieval and browsing. Beyond the classical color histogram approaches, the layout information has proven to be a very descriptive cue for image description. We have developed a descriptor that encodes the layout of an image using a histogram-based representation. The descriptor uses a multi-layer representation that captures the saliency of the image parts. Furthermore it encodes their relative positions using the properties of a Delaunay triangulation. The descriptor is a compact feature vector which content is normalized. Their properties make it suitable for image retrieval and indexing applications. Finally, have applied it to a video browsing application that detects characteristic scenes of a news program.