Summary: This paper proposes probabilistic pruning techniques for a Bayesian video face recognition system. The system selects the most probable face model using model posterior distributions, which can be calculated using a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method. A combination of two new pruning schemes at the resampling stage significantly boosts computational efficiency by comparison with the original online learning algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach achieves better performance in terms of both processing time and ID error rate than a contrasting approach with a temporal decay scheme.