This paper presents our approach for semantic concept retrieval based on visual characteristics of multimedia content. In the process, a visual vocabulary is constructed initially in order to create a representation of the visual features of still image content. This vocabulary contains the most common visual features that are encountered within the still images database and are referred to as “region types”. Based on this vocabulary, a description is then formed to capture the association of a given image to all of its region types. Opposite to other methods, we do not describe an image based on all region types, but rather to a smaller representative subset.We show that the presented approach can be efficiently applied to still image retrieval when the goal is to retrieve semantically similar rather than visually similar image concepts.