Rapid and explosive growth of digital libraries due to the invention of Web cameras, digital cameras, and mobile phones equipped with such devices is making the database management by human annotation an extremely tedious and clumsy task. Image indexing and retrieval is very important research topic that has gained more attention in the current scenario. So in the present situation content based image retrieval is becoming necessary for exact and fast image retrieval. Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is one of the image retrieval techniques which use visual features of an image such as color, shape, and texture features etc. In this paper presents techniques for extracting low level features, various distance measures for measuring the similarity of image and performance measures.