The nearest neighbor query is an important operation widely used in multimedia databases for finding the object that is most similar to a given object Most of techniques for processing nearest neighbor queries employ multidimensional indexes for effective indexing of objects. However, the performance of previous multidimensional indexes, which use N-dimensional rectangles or spheres for representing the capsule of the object cluster, deteriorates seriously as th number of dimensions gets higher, In this paper we first point out the fact that the simple representation of capsuler incurs performance degradation in processing nearest neighbor queries. For alleviating this problem,. we propose(1) adopting new axis systems appropriate to a given cluster (2) representing various shapes of capsules by combining rectangles and spheres, and (3) maintaining outliers separately, We also verify the superiority of our approach through performance evaluation by performing extensive experiments.