This work presents the preliminary results achieved within a FIRB project aimed to develop innovative support tools for automatic or semi-automatic restoration of damaged digital images concerning archaeological and monumental inheritance of Mediterranean coast. In particular, this paper is focused on a methodology for describing image degradation and its meta-representation for content based storing and retrieval. Our innovative idea is to decompose and store in a conventional RDBMS the images content, considering the damages as objects of the images. Moreover, a set of descriptors(a subset of MPEG7 descriptors) is used for the damage meta representation aimed to content based application. Finally we developed a user-friendly database management tool for manipulating the contents of the database