With the evolution of digital technology, there has been a significant increase in the number of images stored in electronic format. These range from personal collections to medical and scientific images that are currently collected in large databases. Many users and organizations now can acquire large numbers of images and it has been very important to retrieve relevant multimedia resources and to effectively locate matching images in the large databases. In this context, content-based image retrieval systems (CBIR) have become very popular for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images with minimum human intervention. The research community are competing for more efficient and effective methods as CBIR systems may be heavily employed in serving time critical applications in scientific and medical domains. This paper proposes an extremely fast CBIR system which uses Multiple Support Vector Machines Ensemble. We have used Daubechies wavelet transformation for extracting the feature vectors of images. The reported test results are very promising. Using data mining techniques not only improved the efficiency of the CBIR systems, but they also improved the accuracy of the overall process. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.