A method and apparatus for recognizing and searching for a face using 2nd-order independent component analysis (ICA) are provided. The method includes performing PCA on an input original image and generating a low-pass filtered image by removing high-frequency component from the original image, subtracting the low-pass filtered image from the original image and obtaining residual image having only frequency-components, and performing ICA on the residual image and generating feature information corresponding to the original image. While an original ICA subtracts independent components (i.e., independent basis components) from gray scale images, the proposed 2nd-order ICA is robust to illumination variation since it is applied to make the remaining images correspond to high pass frequency components.