With the expansion of Internet, a variety of image databases are widely used and it is needed to select the part of an image what he wants. In contents-based image retrieval system, Zernikie moment and ART Descriptors are used fur shape descriptors in MPEC-7. This paper presents a fast computation method to determine the radius of a bounding circle that encloses an object in a binary image. With conventional methods, the whole area of the image should be scanned first and the distance from every pixel to the center point be computed. The proposed 4-directional scan method and fast circle-drawing algorithm is utilized to minimize the scanning area and reduce the number of operations fur computing the distance. Experimental results show that proposed method saves the computation time to determine the radius of a bounding circle efficiently.