A biologically motivated compute intensive approach to computer vision is developed and applied to the problem of face recognition The approach is based on the use of two dimensional Gabor functions that t the receptive elds of simple cells in the primary visual cortex of mammals A descriptor set that is robust against translations is extracted and used for a search in an image database The method was applied on a database of face images of persons and a recognition rate of was achieved The nal version of the paper will report on the results obtained by applying a set of Gabor functions on a database of face images of persons and on the implementation on a Connection Machine CM parallel supercomputer to be installed at our university until the end of