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

Commercial CBIR search engines

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Name Description External Image Query Metadata Query Index Size (Estimate, Millions of Images) Organization Type License (Open/Closed)
Pixolution CBIR search engine, by pixolution No No 32M Private Company Closed
Picalike CBIR engine for Mobile and eCommerce No No (additional filters can be added) Private Company Closed
Elastic Vision Smart image searcher with content-based clustering in a visual network. No No Private Company Closed
Google Image Search Google's CBIR system with reverse image search Yes Yes Public Company Google Custom Search API access
Yandex Image Search Yandex CBIR system Yes Yes 10000M Public Company Closed
Baidu Image Search Baidu's CBIR system Yes Yes 1000M Public Company Closed
ID My Pill Automatic prescription pill identification (CBIR) Yes No Private Company Open (via API)
Imense Image Search Portal CBIR search engine, by Imense. No Yes 3M Private Company Closed
Imprezzeo Image Search CBIR search engine, by Imprezzeo. No Yes Private Company Closed
Incogna Image Search CBIR search engine, by Incogna Inc. No Yes 100M Private Company Closed
MiPai similarity search engine Online similarity search engine Yes Yes 100M Individual Closed
Piximilar Demo engine, developed by Idee Inc. No No 3M Private Company Closed
Empora Product comparison & shopping using CBIR for product images. Previously known as Pixsta No Yes 0.5M Private Company Closed
Shopachu Shopping & fashion CBIR engine, by Incogna Inc. No Yes 1M Private Company Closed
TinEye CBIR site for finding variations of web images, by Idee Inc. Yes No 24200M Private Company Open (via API)
PicScout CBIR service tracks image usage across the web. Yes Yes 270M Private Company (Getty Images) Open (via API)
Galaxy CBIR engine for finding product/catalogue/video frames, by Odd Concepts Inc. Yes Yes 35M Private Company Closed
eBay Image Search Image Search for eBay Fashion No Yes 20M Public Company Closed
LykDat LykDat Fashion Search Engine Yes No 13M Private Company Closed
IMMENSELAB CBIR search engine by KBKGROUP. Yes No 10M Private Company Closed
Macroglossa Visual Search CBIR visual search engine Yes No Private Company Closed
NoClone PC image search engine and classification based on content Yes (a set) No Private Company Closed
Querbie General purpose CBIR visual search engine Yes Yes 20M Private Company Closed
Infringement.Report CBIR visual search engine Yes Yes Private Company Open (via API)

CBIR research projects/demos/open source projects

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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
digiKam Extensive photo management application build on top of KDE libraries. It provides, besides many other features, reverse searches for images in the local collection, detection of duplicates and a fuzzy search by drawings. Yes Yes Desktop-based KDE 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
Luigi Large Histopathological Image Retrieval System developed at University of Tokyo Yes No 0.3M University 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 100M Research Institute Open
MUVIS CBIR System at TUT- Tampere University of Technology. Yes No Desktop-based University Closed
Pastec C++ LGPL index and search engine for near-duplicate image retrieval that uses bag of visual words with ORB features. Yes Yes Private company LGPL
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
PicsLikeThat Image search using visual similarity search and sorting combined with a recommender system. (Cooperation of pixolution GmbH, fotolia and HTW Berlin) No No 12M University Closed
PIRIA CBIR tool developed at CEA-LIST, LVIC (Vision and Content Engineering Laboratory). Yes Yes 1000 M University Closed
Pixcavator Similar image search based on topological image analysis Yes No Desktop-based Private company 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
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
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 Open but not free