The symbolic representations of the pictures are the basic procedure for the computer description of the visual pictures. In this paper，the various methods of the symbolic representations of the pictures are dcicussed，such as the pixel features，the shape features，the geometric structures and the syntactic relations etc. these features are divided into two groups: attribute and non-attribute，accordingly there are two types of the distances to measure the resemblauce of objects or subpictures also: the attribute distance and non-attrilute distance. The semantic net and relaxation laleling methods are discussed too. They resemble the human visual processings more.