Face recognition has made advances but robust commercial applications are still limited due to uncontrolled settings like pose and illumination changes. The proposed FACE framework addresses this through normalization strategies to correct for pose and illumination variations. It also uses two separate image quality indices to assess pose and illumination quality before classification, possibly discarding poor samples. Experimental results show FACE has higher recognition rates than popular methods like SVM, PCA, LDA, and LBP when testing data with pose, expression, illumination and quality variations. The image quality and reliability indices of FACE enhance accuracy and allow individualized processing for better decision making.