The goal of the QBIC—IBM’s Query By Image Content—project is to help users find and retrieve pictures or video by drawing, painting, sketching, or using other graphical means.
Two key properties of QBIC are
its use of image and video content computable properties of color, texture, shape, and motion of images, videos, and their objects in the queries, and
its graphical query language in which queries are posed by drawing, selecting, and other graphical means.