Abstract: The human faces are dynamic multidimensional sys- tems that require good recognition processing techniques. Over the past few decades, the interest in automated face recognition has been growing rapidly, including its theories and algorithms. Public security, criminal identification, identity verification for physical and logical access, and intelligent autonomous vehicles are a few examples of concrete applications of automated face recognition that are gaining popularity among industries. Re-search in face recognition started in the 1960s. Since then, various techniques have been developed and deployed, including local, holistic, and hybrid approaches, which recognize faces using only a few face image features or whole facial features. Yet, robust and efficient face recognition still provides challenges for computer vision and pattern recognition researchers. In this paper, the researchers offered an overview of face recognition, the different used techniques in previous literature and their applications.