Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is an important active research topic helps the user to search the relevant images from the large image collections by analyzing the content of the user required query image. With the explosive growth of image databases over internet and the availability of image capturing devices like mobile phones, digital camera and scanners, efficient image retrieval techniques are required. Many researchers proposed various techniques to improve the retrieval accuracy of content based image retrieval in a reasonable amount of time. When compared to other image compression techniques, the Block truncation coding (BTC) has been considered as a very efficient compression technique which requires least computational complexity and it can also effectively employed to index images in database for CBIR applications. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive survey on various image retrieval techniques using BTC compression based indexing techniques. Further, some other issues, retrieval performance metrics and future enhancements are also discussed.