  The explosive increase and ubiquitous accessibility of visual data on the Web
have led to the prosperity of research activity in image search or retrieval.
With the ignorance of visual content as a ranking clue, methods with text
search techniques for visual retrieval may suffer inconsistency between the
text words and visual content. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR), which
makes use of the representation of visual content to identify relevant images,
has attracted sustained attention in recent two decades. Such a problem is
challenging due to the intention gap and the semantic gap problems. Numerous
techniques have been developed for content-based image retrieval in the last
decade. The purpose of this paper is to categorize and evaluate those
algorithms proposed during the period of 2003 to 2016. We conclude with several
promising directions for future research.
