As one of the most successful applications of image analysis and understanding, face recognition has recently received significant attention, especially during past few years. Recently face recognition is attracting much attention in the society of network multimedia information access. Areas such as network security, content indexing and retrieval, and video compression benefits from face recognition technology because "people" are the center of attention in a lot of video. Network access control via face recognition not only makes hackers virtually impossible to steal one's "password", but also increases the user-friendliness in human-computer interaction. Indexing and/or retrieving video data based on the appearances of particular persons will be useful for users such as news reporters, political scientists, and moviegoers. For the applications of videophone and teleconferencing, the assistance of face recognition also provides a more efficient coding scheme. In this paper, we give an introductory course of this new information processing technology.