This is a list of publicly available Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) engines, these image search engines look at the content (pixels) of their images in order to return results that match a particular query.

Commercial CBIR search engines[edit]

CBIR research projects/demos/open source projects[edit]

Name	Description	External Image Query	Metadata Query	Index Size (Estimate, Millions of Images)	Organization Type	License (Open/Closed)
akiwi	akiwi is a semi-automatic image keywording tool using CBIR techniques. It was developed by HTW Berlin / pixolution GmbH	Yes	Yes	15M	University	Closed
ALIPR	Developed by Penn State University researchers	Yes	Yes		University	Closed
Anaktisi	This Web-Solution implements a new family of CBIR descriptors. These descriptors combine in one histogram color and texture information and are suitable for accurately retrieving images.	Yes	No	0.225M	University	Open
BRISC	BRISC is a recursive acronym for BRISC Really IS Cool, and is (conveniently enough)  also an anagram of Content-Based Image Retrieval System.	Yes	No		University	GPL
Caliph & Emir	Creation and Retrieval of images based on MPEG-7.	Yes	No	Desktop-based	University	GPL
FIRE	Open source query by visual example CBIR system. Developed at RWTH Aachen University. FIRE is a research  system developed with extensibility  in mind and can easily be combined with textual information retrieval systems.	No	No		University	Open
GNU Image Finding Tool	Query by example image search system.	Yes	No	Desktop-based	GNU	GPL
ISSBP	Similar Image Search by Imense plugin  for Adobe Bridge, free beta.	Yes	Yes	free-beta limited to 4k images	Private Company	Closed
img(Rummager)	Image retrieval Engine (Freeware Application).	Yes	No	Desktop-based	Individual	Closed
imgSeek	photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features.	Yes	No		Individual	GPL
IKONA	Generic CBIR system – INRIA – IMEDIA	Yes	Yes		University	Closed
IOSB	Image retrieval demonstration software of Fraunhofer IOSB (Germany)	Yes	No	Desktop-based	Research Institute	Closed
LIRE	Java GPL library for content based image retrieval based on Lucene including multiple low level global and local features  and different indexing strategies including  bag of visual words and hashing.	Yes	Yes		University	GPL
Lucignolo	Image similarity search engine using only  the native full-text search engine Lucene.	Yes	Yes	106M	Research Institute	Closed
MIFile	Image similarity search engine based on MI File (Metric Inverted File) developed at ISTI-CNR. Source code of the MI File.	No	No	106M	Research Institute	Open
MUVIS	CBIR System at TUT- Tampere University of Technology.	Yes	No	Desktop-based	University	Closed
PIRIA	CBIR tool developed at CEA-LIST, LIVIC (Vision and Content Engineering Laboratory).	Yes	Yes	130M	University	Closed
PicsLikeThat	Image search using visual similarity search and sorting combined with a recommender system. (Cooperation of pixolution, fotolia and  HTW Berlin)	No	No	12M	University	Closed
Pixcavator	Similar image search based on topological image analysis	Yes	No	Desktop-based	Private company	Closed
pixolu	visual & semantic image search engine, by  pixolution GmbH & HTW Berlin.	Yes	No		Private Company / University	Closed
QuickLook	Visual information retrieval system with relevance feedback	No	Yes		University	Closed
RETIN	Interactive images retrieval system – CNRS –  ETIS Lab., MIDI Team	No	No		University	Closed
Retrievr	Search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch or uploading an image.	No	No		University	Closed
SIMBA	demo of system by the Albert-Ludwigs- Universitet Freiburg (Germany) Inst.  for Pattern Recognition and Image Processing	Yes	No	0.002M	University	Closed
TagProp	The demonstration of image annotation tool TagProp in ICCV2009 for image set: Corel 5k ESP Game IAPR TC-12 and MIR Flickr.	No	Yes		Institute	Closed
VIRaL	Visual Image Retrieval and Localization: A visual search engine that, given a query  image, retrieves photos depicting the same  object or scene under varying viewpoint or  lighting conditions. Using Flickr photos of urban scenes, it automatically estimates where a picture is taken, suggests tags,  identifies known landmarks or points of interest, and links to relevant Wikipedia articles. It currently supports 39 cities around the world.	Yes	Yes	2.221M	University	Closed
Windsurf	A general framework for efficiently processing content-based image queries with particular emphasis to the region-based paradigm; it provides an environment where different alternatives of the paradigm can be implemented, allowing such implementations to be compared on a fair basis, from the points of view of both effectiveness and efficiency.	Yes	No		University	Closed
PIBE	An adaptive image browsing system that provides users with an intuitive, easy-to-use, structured view of an image collection and complements it with ideas from the field of adaptable content-based similarity search. A hierarchical view of images (the Browsing Tree) that can be customized according to user preferences is provided.	Yes	No		University	Closed
SHIATSU	A novel system for automatic video tagging which is based on shot boundaries detection and hierarchical annotation processes. The tagging phase assigns semantic concepts  to both shot sequences and whole videos, by exploiting visual features extracted from  key frames.	Yes	Yes		University	Closed