A framework of real time face tracking and recognition is presented, which integrates skin color based tracking and PCA/BPNN (principle component analysis/back propagation neural network) hybrid recognition techniques. The algorithm is able to track the human face against a complex background and also works well when temporary occlusion occurs. We also obtain a very high recognition rate by averaging a number of samples over a long image sequence. The proposed approach has been successfully tested by many experiments, and can operate at 20 frames/s on an 800 MHz PC.