In many areas of commerce, government, academia, and hospitals, large collections of digital images are
being created. Many of these collections are the product of digitizing existing collections of analogue photographs,
diagrams, drawings, paintings, and prints. Usually, the only way of searching these collections
was by keyword indexing, or simply by browsing. Digital images databases however, open the way to
content-based searching. In this paper we survey some technical aspects of current content-based image
retrieval systems.