  The content based image retrieval aims to find the similar images from a
large scale dataset against a query image. Generally, the similarity between
the representative features of the query image and dataset images is used to
rank the images for retrieval. In early days, various hand designed feature
descriptors have been investigated based on the visual cues such as color,
texture, shape, etc. that represent the images. However, the deep learning has
emerged as a dominating alternative of hand-designed feature engineering from a
decade. It learns the features automatically from the data. This paper presents
a comprehensive survey of deep learning based developments in the past decade
for content based image retrieval. The categorization of existing
state-of-the-art methods from different perspectives is also performed for
greater understanding of the progress. The taxonomy used in this survey covers
different supervision, different networks, different descriptor type and
different retrieval type. A performance analysis is also performed using the
state-of-the-art methods. The insights are also presented for the benefit of
the researchers to observe the progress and to make the best choices. The
survey presented in this paper will help in further research progress in image
retrieval using deep learning.
