We present in this paper a biometric system of face detection and recognition in color images. The face detection technique is based on skin color information and fuzzy classification. A new algorithm is proposed in order to detect automatically face features (eyes, mouth and nose) and extract their correspondent geometrical points. These fiducial points are described by sets of wavelet components which are used for recognition. To achieve the face recognition, we use neural networks and we study its performances for different inputs. We compare the two types of features used for recognition: geometric distances and Gabor coefficients which can be used either independently or jointly. This comparison shows that Gabor coefficients are more powerful than geometric distances. We show with experimental results how the importance recognition ratio makes our system an effective tool for automatic face detection and recognition. Comment: 7 pages, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, IJCSIS, Impact Factor 0.423