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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.
| 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 |
| Chic Engine | Visual fashion search engine (CBIR) | Yes | No | 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 | Closed |
| 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) |
| 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 |
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Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146 was a case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit involving a copyright infringement claim against Amazon.com, Inc. and Google, Inc., by the magazine publisher Perfect 10, Inc. The court held that framing and hyperlinking of original images for use in an image search engine constituted a fair use of Perfect 10's images because the use was highly transformative, and thus not an infringement of the magazine's copyright ownership of the original images.
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