This dissertation aimed to compare the performance of state-of-the-arte face recognition algorithms in facial images captured from multiple video sequences. Three specific objectives were pursued: to develop a method for determining when a face is in frontal position with respect to the camera (frontal face detector); to evaluate the accuracy for recognition algorithms based on the facial images obtained with the help of the frontal face detector; and finally, to identify the algorithm with better performance when applied to verification and identification tasks in video surveillance systems. The comparison of the recognition methods was performed adopting the following approach: first, a frontal face detector, which allowed the capture of facial images was created; second, the algorithms were trained and tested with the help of facereclib, a library developed by the Biometrics Group at the IDIAP Research Institute; third, ROC and CMC curves were used as metrics to compare the recognition algorithms; and finally, the results were analyzed and the conclusions were reported in this manuscript. Experiments conducted on the video datasets: MOBIO, ChokePOINT, VidTIMIT, HONDA, and four fragments of several films, indicate that the Inter-Session Variability Modelling and Gaussian Mixture Model algorithms provide the best accuracy on classification when the algorithms are used in verification and identification tasks, which indicates them as a good automatic recognition techniques for video surveillance applications.