Due to the robustness of Gabor features against local distortions caused by variance of illumination, expression and pose, they have been successfully applied for face recognition. The Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) evaluation and the recent Face Verification Competition (FVC2004) have seen the top performance of Gabor feature based methods. This paper aims to give a detailed survey of state of the art 2D face recognition algorithms using Gabor wavelets for feature extraction. Existing problems are covered and possible solutions are suggested. Keywords Joint time