The invention discloses a face detection method and system based on image on-line learning. The face detection method based on image on-line learning comprises the steps of (1) preprocessing, wherein illumination compensation and graying processing are carried out on an image to be detected, image enhancement is carried out, nonlinear smooth filtering is carried out, denoising is carried out on the image, gray levels of pixels are normalized to obtain a high-quality gray level image, and then size normalization processing and edge detection processing are carried out; (2) carrying out face gesture detection, wherein the positions of the human eyes are determined, a human face area is divided, the rotation angle of a human face in the pitching dimension, the rotation angle of the human face in the depth dimension and the rotation angle of the human face in the plane dimension are detected, and whether the human face has an expression or not is automatically judged; (3) carrying out face detection, wherein the position of the human face in the image is determined, organs of the human face are located, and gray features of the image are selected, and are transmitted to a detection template which is trained in an off-line mode to carry out judgment; (4) updating, wherein the image which is processed through detection serves as a new sample to be applied to learning of a multi-layer cascade AdaBoost classifier, and the weight of set characteristic values of the multi-layer cascade AdaBoost classifier is updated. According to the face detection method and system based on image on-line learning, the accuracy rate of face detection can be improved.