Face represent one of the most common visual patterns in our environment, and humans have a remarkable ability to recognize faces. Face recognition does not fit into the traditional approaches of model based recognition in vision. We present here a feature based approach to face recognition, where the features are derived from the intensity data without assuming any knowledge of the face structure. The feature extraction model is biologically motivated, and the locations of the features often correspond to salient facial features such as the eyes, nose, etc. topological graphs are used to represent relations between features, and a simple deterministic graph matching scheme which exploits the basic structure is used to recognize familiar faces from a database. Each of the stages in the system can be fully implemented in parallel to achieve real time recognition.