A typical automatic face recognition system is composed of three parts: face detection, face alignment and face recognition. Conventionally, these three parts are processed in a bottom-up manner: face detection is performed first, then the results are passed to face alignment, and finally to face recognition. The bottom-up approach is one extreme of vision approaches. The other extreme approach is topdown. In this paper, we proposed a Markovian stochastic mixture approach for combining bottom-up and top-down face recognition: face recognition is performed from the results of face alignment in a bottom-up way, and face alignment is performed based on the results of face recognition in a top-down way. By modeling the mixture face recognition as a stochastic process, the recognized person is decided probabilistically according to the probability distribution coming from the stochastic face recognition, and the recognition problem becomes that “who the most probable person is when the...