The main motivation behind the development of the IFSS software was to assist law enforcement agencies and similar organisations when they need to find whether a particular image (which they already possess) is stored in the typically thousands of images on a hard disk. For example, the police may have an image showing illegal activity of some kind, and wish to automatically search a seized hard disk to see whether the image is on that hard disk.

The IFSS software uses a simple 'wizard' so the user can quickly choose the source image, type of search, search parameters, and which folder to start searching in.
The two types of search are

• a search for images which are similar to the source image presented to the system, and
• a search for the source image inside other images, commonly called image within image search.

When you do a search, the IFSS program allows you to prioritise the importance of some visual aspects.
For example, if you are searching for an image of a person then skin colors may be more important than other colors. In this event IFSS may be directed to 'look' for skin colors, and weigh this component more than other colors. Similarly, the edge information in an image may also be selected as a parameter which should be employed during the search process. There are many other parameters which can be set for the searching process.

The IFSS software can be used to search for an image inside one or more other images. For example, given the image of a face, the software can search through hundreds of other images to find the face.