Although much research has been done in the area of content based image retrieval (CBIR), little progress has been made to fully implement an engine solely based on the search of image content. This paper examines one of the basic problems in pattern recognition which highlights the difficulty in the area of content understanding in CBIR, i.e. the inability of current systems to fully incorporate low level features of image, such as intensity, colour, texture, shape and spatial constraints characteristics, with the high level features such as semantic content. To further the development of content based image processing, semantic algorithms should be combined with low level features and be used to process the image objects.