Abstract: A system for extracting one or more regions of interest from a plurality of images to retrieve images based on visual similarity to a query image. Sequences of image processing associated with a segmentation strategy selected by user are performed on a set of training images to identify the region of interests. The segmentation strategy and the regions of interest are stored, as well as a visual signature of the image that captures the global layout of the image. New images are processed for which no segmentation strategy had previously been defined. A search is made through the layout signatures collected from the set of training images to identify images with similar layouts. Given a query and its visual characteristics, the system finds images stored in the database with visually similar regions of interest.