The invention discloses an intelligent charging system and a method based on a face recognition, belongs to the technical filed of intelligent charging. The charging system comprises a central controlunit, an identity recognition module, a water control management module, a timeout charging module, a card recycling module and an intelligent card issuer. The central control unit is both a databaseand a controller, not only stores the identity information of all users but also issues commands to other modules to perform each step. The identity recognition module collects and preprocesses avatars of the users, extracts facial features of the user, encodes the facial features in a certain encoding mode, and stores the facial features in the database. When the identity recognition module is used, the identity recognition module matches and identifies the collected avatars with the photos in the database. Only if the match is successful, the card can be used. The intelligent charging system and the method based on the face recognition combines a face recognition technology, a digital code generation technology and an intelligent card to solve the problem that the intelligent card whichis carried around is easy to be lost, can be applied in a variety of occasions to realize multi applications with a single intelligent card. And the intelligent card can be used as needed to save resources.