图像检索，又称图像检索 ，系统是一个电脑浏览的系统，从一个大型的数字图像数据库去检索和检索图像。大多传统和一般图像检索的方式是利用一些增加元数据(metadata)的方法，例如：字幕、关键词或是图像的说明，如此一来就可以透过注解词完成检索。人工的图像注解是费时、费力并且昂贵；为了解决这个问题，已经有大量的研究在做自动图像注解方面上。此外，越来越多的社会网络应用和语义网已经产生了数个以网络为基底发展的图像注解工具。

第一个以微电脑为基底开发的图像数据库检索系统，是由80年代麻省理工学院里的Banireddy Prasad、Amar Gupta、Hoo-min Toong、and Stuart Madnick所共开发出来的。这是记载于1987年2月发行的IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics。 .

An image retrieval system is a computer system for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata such as captioning', keywords, or descriptions to the images so that retrieval can be performed over the annotation words. Manual image annotation is time-consuming, laborious and expensive; to address this, there has been a large amount of research done on automatic image annotation. Additionally, the increase in social web applications and the semantic web have inspired the development of several web-based image annotation tools.