Using a pictorial dictionary as a high level user interface for visual information retrieval

The need for efficient retrieval of visual information is now widely accepted across many research domains. While much progress has been made in the area of low level representation and matching, visual information retrieval systems are often limited by the users ability to express a given query. Current retrieval technology does not allow human operators to formulate queries by means of high level semantics. In this paper we propose a 'pictorial dictionary' scheme to address these problems.