A device and a method for measuring visual similarity between two images. One image (Q) being referred to as the model and one image (T) being referred to as the target, the method comprises a prior step (E2) of segmenting the images into regions (Qi, Ti), with each region there being associated at least one attribute (F) representative of at least one characteristic of the region. It furthermore comprises the steps of calculating (E3) the visual similarity between the pairs (Qi, Ti) of possible regions of the two images (Q, T), by taking into account the distance (D(Qi, Ti)) between the said attributes (F) of the regions (Qi, Ti) matched and the areas of the regions (Qi, Ti) matched; selecting (E4) a certain number of pairs (Qi, Ti) of regions whose similarity is greater than a first fixed threshold (ε), calculating (E9) the global similarity between the two images, based on the pairs (Qi, Ti) of regions selected.