The motivations for organizing this special section were to better address the challenges of face recognition in real-world scenarios, to promote systematic research and evaluation of promising methods and systems, to provide a snapshot of where we are in this domain, and to stimulate discussion about future directions. We solicited original contributions of research on all aspects of real-world face recognition, including: the design of robust face similarity features and metrics; robust face clustering and sorting algorithms; novel user interaction models and face recognition algorithms for face tagging; novel applications of web face recognition; novel computational paradigms for face recognition; challenges in large scale face recognition tasks, e.g., on the Internet; face recognition with contextual information; face recognition benchmarks and evaluation methodology for moderately controlled or uncontrolled environments; and video face recognition. We received 42 original submissions, four of which were rejected without review; the other 38 papers entered the normal review process. Each paper was reviewed by three reviewers who are experts in their respective topics. More than 100 expert reviewers have been involved in the review process. The papers were equally distributed among the guest editors. A final decision for each paper was made by at least two guest editors assigned to it. To avoid conflict of interest, no guest editor submitted any papers to this special section.