Todays abundance of storage coupled with digital technologies in virtually any scientific or commercial application such as medical and biological imaging or music archives deal with tremendous quantities of images, videos or audio files stored in large multimedia databases. For content-based data mining and retrieval purposes suitable similarity models are crucial. The Earth Mover’s Distance was introduced in Computer Vision to better approach human perceptual similarities. Its computation, however, is too complex for usage in interactive multimedia database scenarios. In order to enable efficient query processing in large databases, we propose an index-supported multistep algorithm. We therefore develop new lower bounding approximation techniques for the Earth Mover’s Distance which satisfy high quality criteria including completeness (no false drops), index-suitability and fast computation. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach in extensive experiments on large image databases