Face recognition presents a challenging problem in the field of image analysis and computer vision as such a large number of face recognition algorithms have been developed in last decade. In this paper firstly I present an overview of face recognition and discuss its application and technical challenges. Thereafter I represent the various face recognition techniques. This includes PCA, LDA, ICA, Gabor wavelet, soft computing tool like ANN for recognition and various hybrid combinations of these techniques. This review investigates face recognition and all these methods of face recognition with parameters that have challenges like illumination, pose variation and facial expressions.