Face recognition is a well-known approach for identity recognition. Variation in head pose is a main factor that interferes with face recognition systems. This paper proposes an efficient head pose determination method and its application to face recognition on a multi-pose face DB in order to solve the pose variation-related problem. The first step is to detect a facial region using Adaboost. Next, after undergoing preprocessing on the detected face, a mask is placed to cover it. At the detected facial region, the pose is determined by relations of the position of the centroid points of the eyes and lip regions detected by using ellipse-fitting method. Finally, face recognition is conducted by applying template matching between a set of facial images in multi-pose face DB pertinent to the determined head pose and the input face image. In experiments, the proposed approach outperformed the conventional PCA-based face recognition approach depending on a single-pose face DB.