The thing is though, you won't have difficulties finding papers on those topics. However, you will probably not have any luck finding many concrete and practical implementations that you could look at.
So it's a far way from reading the papers to having something working.
There's a list of CBIR's on Wikipedia and ammong those there are a few open source ones. I didn't really had time to check them all but during skimming through them imgSeek [2] caught my eye.
I'm currently researching MVP's and reading on VP-trees, BK-trees [1], GNAT [2] and HEngine [3]. Do you have any advice?
[1] http://blog.notdot.net/2007/4/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Part-1-BK...
[2] http://www.vldb.org/conf/1995/P574.PDF
[3] https://www.cse.msu.edu/~alexliu/publications/HammingQuery/H...