In this paper, we propose an original color image analysis scheme to retrieve among all the target images of a database, those which contain the same object as that represented by the query image, these images being acquired under different illumination conditions. Rather than considering the color vectors of the pixels to characterize the images, we propose to exploit the concept of ranks of CCD sensor responses which are assumed to be preserved in case of illumination changes. Since these ranks are not directly available from a color image, we propose to estimate their probabilities of occurrence thanks to fuzzy functions. These probabilities are used by our object recognition scheme whose effectiveness is assessed with a public database that contains images of objects acquired under different illuminations.