The goal of content-based image retrieval(CBIR) is uppermost to reduce the semantic gap between the simple visual features and the abundant semantics delivered by an image, and a critical point in the advancement of content-based retrieval is the image semantic modeling and extraction. This paper reviews the state of the art of image retrieval using semantics mainly focusing upon two aspects: image semantic modeling and image semantic extraction. In the paper, image semantic model is generalized firstly as ...