In the paper, an e cient image database system is developed. The most important features of the proposed system include compressed domain indexing, searching by using scalable features, and progressive image transmission. User interaction is involved at both the search re nement stage and display of the query results. The most important query types include query by color layout and query by wavelet coe cients clustering information. The indexing and searching algorithms are tightly coupled with the underlying image compression algorithm by means the images are stored in the database reducing both the complexity and the storage requirements of the database management system. In this research, we utilize our previously developed very high performance wavelet image coding algorithm termed signi cance-linked connected component analysis, which not only renders very high compression performance when compared to other top-ranked wavelet image coding algorithms and the JPEG standard, but als...