Abstract: Interest in image retrieval has increased in large part due to the rapid growth of the World Wide Web. The traditional text based search and retrieval has its own limitations and hence we move to a content based image search and retrieval system. In this paper we present an image retrieval system that takes an image as the input query and retrieves images based on image content. Content Based Image Retrieval is an approach for retrieving semantically-relevant image from an image database based on automatically-derived image features. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR), also known as query by image content (QBIC) and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR) is the application of computer vision to the image retrieval problem. "Content-based" means that the search will analyze the actual contents of the image. The term 'content' in this context might refer colours, shapes, textures, or any other information that can be derived from the image itself. Here we deal with colour images.

Keywords: CBIR, shape, texture, text retrieval, feature extraction.