The present invention relates to a face recognition system and a face recognition method, mainly comprising a lighting preprocessing module, a feature generation module, a facial feature library module, and a feature matching and recognition module. In the face recognition method, the inputted face image is first light-difference optimized by means of the lighting preprocessing module, then a feature vector of the face image is generated by means of the feature generation module; then, the feature vector to be recognized is matched with all of the feature vectors in the feature library and computed to arrive at an identity result corresponding to the feature vector to be recognized. In the technical solutions of the present invention, the identity of a face image to be recognized may be determined in real time for a system whose computing resources are limited, using a short period of time and having high accuracy.