Visual information in large digital databases has been grown abundantly in the recent years and content based image retrieval (CBIR) attracts the interest of image processing oriented research people. The CBIR systems are vital performance due to the usage of features such as color, texture and shape of the query image. Searching a collection of images that have similarities with input images and without knowing the name of the image, makes a search system that applies the concept of content-based image retrieval (CBIR), is very necessary. The successful of the CBIR system creates the intension to apply it on many real world fields such as search engine, web and human disease analysis etc., This paper surveys a lot of applications based on the CBIR systems and this paper concentrates on the four types of applications which are belongs with medical field, remote sense imaging, forensic, security applications. The recent papers which are written showed that the applications which are reviewed with the explanation about technologies used to enhance the study of CBIR based applications and the methods which are adopted for CBIR in recent period. This paper is more useful for the people who want to continue their research in content based image retrieval.