Since its advent, the use of digital camera in mobile phones is getting more popular, where information retrieval based on visual appearance of an object is very useful when specific parameters for the object are not known. Though it is well-liked, it needs energy aware algorithms to carry out the various tasks such as segmentation and feature extraction. In this paper, a new energy aware fuzzy color segmentation algorithm is proposed and which has been applied for face segmentation in criminal identification using mobile devices. The criminals in the application are in three classes. They are New Criminal (NC), Suspected Criminal (SC) and Confirmed Criminal (CC). It is basically a mobile image-based content search engine that takes photographs of criminals as image queries and finds their relevant contents by matching them to the similar contents in the criminal databases. The energy aware fuzzy color segmentation is used to obtain the most significant parts of an image — facial regions of the persons and which are used in building image-based queries to the databases. Content search methodology in the application is also improved through the fuzzy modeling to make the application more flexible and simpler. Through the experiment conducted, it has been found that the proposed color segmentation algorithm is more robust and it reduces the computational time in searching process by minimizing the number of false cases. It could detect the faces in the images where the other known algorithms have failed to detect.