A system and method of face recognition comprising multiple phases implemented in a parallel architecture. The first phase is a normalization phase whereby a captured image is normalized to the same size, orientation, and illumination of stored images in a preexisting database. The second phase is a feature extraction/distance matrix phase where a distance matrix is generated for the captured image. In a coarse recognition phase, the generated distance matrix is compared with distance matrices in the database using Euclidean distance matches to create candidate lists, and in a detailed recognition phase, multiple face recognition algorithms are applied to the candidate lists to produce a final result. The distance matrices in the normalized database may be broken into parallel lists for parallelization in the feature extraction/distance matrix phase, and the candidate lists may also be grouped according to a dissimilarity algorithm for parallel processing in the detailed recognition phase.