Multimed Tools Appl https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-5961-1 MDCBIR-MF: multimedia data for content-based image retrieval by using multiple features Rehan Ashraf 1 · Mudassar Ahmed 1 · Usman Ahmad 2 · Muhammad Asif Habib 1 · Sohail Jabbar 1 · Kashif Naseer 3 Received: 13 January 2018 / Revised: 7 March 2018 / Accepted: 2 April 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Due to recent development in technology, the complexity of multimedia is signifi- cantly increased and the retrieval of similar multimedia content is an open research problem. In the service of multimedia service, the requirement of Multimedia Indexing Technology is increasing to retrieve and search for interesting data from huge Internet. Since the tradi- tional retrieval method, which is using textual index, has limitation to handle the multimedia data in current Internet, alternatively, the more efficient representation method is needed. Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is a process that provides a framework for image search and low-level visual features are commonly used to retrieve the images from the image database. The basic requirement in any image retrieval process is to sort the images with a close similarity in term of visual appearance. The color, shape, and texture are the examples of low-level image features. The feature combination that is also known as fea- ture fusion is applied in CBIR to increase the performance, a single feature is not robust to the transformations that are in the image datasets. This paper represents a new Content- Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) technique to fuse the color and texture features to extract  Sohail Jabbar sjabbar.research@gmail.com Rehan Ashraf rehan@ntu.edu.pk Mudassar Ahmed mudassar@ntu.edu.pk Usman Ahmad usman.ahmad82@yahoo.com Kashif Naseer kashifnaseer85@yahoo.com 1 Department of Computer Science, National Textile University, Faisalabad, Pakistan 2 Department of Computer Science, Lahore College for Women University, Lahore, Pakistan 3 Department of Computer Engineering, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan