A face recognition apparatus and method. Sub-images having different face sizes are generated using a received face image of a person to be identified. Feature vectors of the sub-images are generated and observation nodes are generated based on the feature vectors. The observation nodes corresponding to the sub-images are compared with stored reference nodes of sub-images of a registered person on a face size by face size basis to calculate similarity scores between the observation nodes and the reference nodes. State nodes are generated based on the respective similarity scores of the face sizes, the observation and state nodes are compared, and the state nodes are compared to perform face recognition. This improves face recognition performance and face recognition speed. Face recognition performance robust to facial expression variation or type information is achieved by performing I-shaped curvature Gabor filtering on a plurality of sub-images based on the eye distance.