In this paper, we proposed and developed a fast and efficient real time face detection and recognition which can be run on embedded system instead of high performance desktop. In the face detection process, we detect a face by finding eye part which is one of the most salient facial features after applying various image processing methods, then in the face recognition, we finally recognize the face by comparing the current face with the prepared face database using a template matching algorithm. Also we optimized the algorithm in our system to be successfully used in the embedded system, and performed the face detection and recognition experiments on the embedded board to verify the performance. The developed method can be applied to automatic door, mobile computing environment and various robot.