A robot includes a face extracting section for extracting features of a face included in an image captured by a CCD camera, and a face recognition section for recognizing the face based on a result of face extraction by the face extracting section. The face extracting section is implemented by Gabor filters that filter images using a plurality of filters that have orientation selectivity and that are associated with different frequency components. The face recognition section is implemented by a support vector machine that maps the result of face recognition to a non-linear space and that obtains a hyperplane that separates in that space to discriminate a face from a non-face. The robot is allowed to recognize a face of a user within a predetermined time under a dynamically changing environment.