Aiming to the defects that some traditional contour descriptors can’t classify similar contours and that others o not have a good internal rotation-invariant property,the sector-projection-wavelet-descriptor was proposed. Contour to be recognized was first orientation normalized by its principal axis. And then,the normalized contour was projected on the prepared N-sector-areas. Finally,the curve gotten from previous steps was analyzed by wavelet theory. This descriptor can not only decrease the error caused by orientation normalization,but also can classify some contours which can not be classified by ring-projection or Fourier descriptor. The experiments compared with other contour descriptors show: sector-projection-wavelet-descriptor has a good recognition result whatever the contours to be classified are similar or largely different.