The goal of this project is a system which efficiently retrieves database images that contain a given query pattern or a region similar to the query. The proposed solution is the SEDL (Scale Estimation for Directed Location) image retrieval system. The SEDL framework is general enough to find both color and shape patterns. It has been successfully applied to find (1) color patterns in a database of product advertisements with product logos as queries, and (2) shape patterns in a database of Chinese characters.