Abstract: The image-based face recognition has made great progress over the past decade,with good performance achieved under certain constrained conditions.However,the solution is still challenged by variations in illumination,facial pose and expression.Here the main reason is that the 2D image is essentially a projection of the 3D object onto 2D space.Due to the explicit representation of facial surface,exploiting 3D shape information for face recognition is attracting more and more attention in recent years,to cope with the challenges.This paper surveys the state of the art of 3D face recognition.Firstly,the background,conception and basic procedure of 3D face recognition are introduced.Then,3D face recognition approaches,categorized into three main groups:spatial matching methods,local feature based methods,and global feature based methods,are reviewed respectively.Besides,face recognition using bi-modal of 2D+3D is introduced briefly.Several typical 3D face databases are listed,and four typical methods are implemented for comparison.Finally,the paper summarizes the advantages,discusses the current challenges,and outlines the future development trend.