In this paper we address two key issues in image retrieval: (1) the use of rectangles in queries to express properties of regions in the desired target images, and (2) the use of oversegmentation to build the index of images in the database. In our method, the rectangles in the user?s query are used to control a partial resegmentation of each candidate image. These query-driven partial resegmentations provide the features for determining the distance between the query and each candidate, so that the closest candidates can be determined and retrieved. This method enables the construction of image retrieval systems with completely automatic indexing.