Can an intermediary collection help users search image databases without annotations?

Developing methods for searching image databases is a challenging and ongoing area of research. A common approach is to use manual annotations, although generating annotations can be expensive in terms of time and money, and therefore may not be justified in many situations. Content-based search techniques which extract visual features from image data can be used, but users are typically forced to express their information need using example images, or through sketching interfaces. This can be difficult if no visual example of the information need is available, or when the information need cannot be easily drawn. In this paper, we consider an alternative approach which allows a user to search for images through an intermediate database.