In multimedia database systems, the nearest neighbor Query occurs frequently and requires the processing cost higher than other spatial Queries do. It needs the measurement of search distance that the number of searched nodes and the computation time in an index can be minimized for optimizing the cost of processing the nearest neighbor query. The circular location property of objects is considered to accurately select the nodes which will be searched in the nearest neighbor query. In this paper, we propose the processing method of nearest neighbor queries be considered a circular location property of object where the search space consists of a circular domain and show its characteristics. The proposed method uses the circular minimum distance and the circular optimal distance, the search measurement for optimizing the processing cost of nearest neighbor queries.