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With the growing use of hyperspectral remote sensing payloads, there has been a significant increase in the number of hyperspectral remote sensing image archives, leading to a massive amount of collected data. This highlights the need for an efficient content-based hyperspectral image retrieval (CBHIR) system to manage and enable better use of hyperspectral remote-sensing image archives. Conventional CBHIR systems characterize each image by a set of endmembers and then perform image retrieval based on pairwise distance measures. Such an approach significantly increases the computational complexity of the retrieval, mainly when the diversity of materials is high. Those systems also have difficulties in retrieving images containing particular materials with extremely low abundance compared to other materials, which leads to describing image content with inappropriate and/or insufficient spectral features. In this article, a novel CBHIR system to define global hyperspectral image representations based on a semantic approach to differentiate foreground and background image content for different retrieval scenarios is introduced to address these issues. The experiments conducted on a new benchmark archive of multi-label hyperspectral images, which is first introduced in this study, validate the retrieval accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed system. Comparative performance analysis with the state-of-the-art CBHIR systems demonstrates that modeling hyperspectral image content with foreground and background vocabularies has a positive effect on retrieval performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]