We propose an efficient face recognition system for controllinng the access to the restricted zone using both the face region detectors based on facial symmetry and the extended self-organizing maps (ESOM) which have sensory synapses and descriptive synapses. Based on the visual cues of the facial symmetry, we apply horizontal and vertical projections on elliptic regions detected by GHT(generalized hough transform) to identify all the face regions from the complex background.And we propose an ESOM which can exploit principal components and imitate an elastic similarity matching, to authenticate faces of the enlisted member. In order to cope with changes of facial experession or glasses wearing, etc, the facial descriptions of each member at the time of authentication are simultaneously updated on the discriptive synapses online using the incremental learning of the proposed ESOM. Experimental results prove the feasibility of our approach.