Abstract: A typical automatic face recognition system is composed of three parts: face detection, face alignment and face recognition. Conventionally, these three parts are processed in a bottom-up manner: face detection is performed first, then the results are passed to face alignment, and finally to face recognition. The bottom-up approach is one extreme of vision approaches. The other extreme approach is top-down. In this paper, we proposed a stochastic mixture approach for combining bottom-up and top-down face recognition: face recognition is performed from the results of face alignment in a bottom-up way, and face alignment is performed based on the results of face recognition in a top-down way. By modeling the mixture face recognition as a stochastic process, the recognized person is decided probabilistically according to the probability distribution coming from the stochastic face recognition, and the recognition problem becomes that “who the most probable person is when the stochastic process of face recognition goes on for a long time or ideally for an infinite duration”. This problem is solved with the theory of Markov chains by modeling the stochastic process of face recognition as a Markov chain. As conventional face alignment is not suitable for this mixture approach, discriminative face alignment is proposed. And we also prove that the stochastic mixture face recognition results only depend on discriminative face alignment, not on conventional face alignment. The effectiveness of our approach is shown by extensive experiments.