Support vector machine (SVM), as a novel approach in pattern recognition, has demonstrated a success in face detection and face recognition. In this paper, a face recognition approach based on the SVM classifier with the nearest neighbor classifier (NNC) is proposed. The principal component analysis (PCA) is used to reduce the dimension and extract features. Then one-against-all stratedy is used to train the SVM classifiers. At the testing stage, we propose an algorithm by combining SVM classifier with NNC to improve the correct recognition rate. We conduct the experiment on the Cambridge ORL face database. The result shows that our approach outperforms the standard eigenface approach and some other approaches.