The invention provides a method for establishing a facial feature database in a video image. On the basis of a locally linear embedding (LLE) algorithm, a face manifold unit in the video image is learned, high-dimensional image space of the image is reduced to low-dimensional image space, and a relationship between an internal low-dimensional structure and high-dimensional observation data is searched; and clustering is carried out on the low-dimensional image space by using a K-means clustering algorithm, so that similar face image data are close, a face of each clustering center is used as a representative face image, a redundant example is removed, and a representative face feature base is established finally. In the LLE algorithm, the embedding dimension of the low-dimensional space is determined according to a Sammon coefficient. According to the invention, facial feature base establishment is realized in the video image; and some representative images are selected from many training images and are used for follow-up algorithm learning. Therefore, while the face identification rate is kept well, the training time and the occupied internal storage are reduced substantially, so that the processing speed increases.