Promoted by the professional and diverse demands of image retrieval

the technique of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) becomes more mature. More and more commercial and scientific research systems are developed. As any technique is promoted by the performance evaluation of corresponding research area

for the development of effective image retrieval applications it is imperative to study the standard of performance evaluation in content-based image retrieval. Problems such as a common image database for performance comparison and a means of getting correlation judgement for queries are explained. This paper presents a review of the methods of performance evaluation in content-based image retrieval proposed in the literatures and tries to figure out the developing direction in the future. This paper also recommends that the content-based retrieval research community should establish a standard test-bed for evaluating image retrieval effectiveness. Further work needs to be done to better involve users in the evaluation process because the ultimate aim is to measure the usefulness of a system for a user. Interactive performance evaluations including several levels of feedback and user interaction need to be developed.