A pattern recognition apparatus includes an image inputting unit, a face-area extracting unit, a face-characteristic-point detecting unit, a normalized-image generating unit, a subspace generating unit, a similarity calculating unit, a reference-subspace storing unit, a judging unit, and a display unit. The pattern recognition apparatus calculates an input subspace from an input pattern, calculates a reference subspace from a reference pattern, and sets, with respect to orthogonal bases Φ1, . . . , ΦM of the input subspace and orthogonal bases Ψ1, . . . , ΨN of the reference subspace, an average of distances between Φi and Ψj (i=1, . . . , M and j=1, . . . , N) as a similarity, and performs identification using this similarity.