The objective of this work is the integration and optimization of an automatic face detection and recognition system for video indexing applications. The system is composed of a face detection stage presented previously which provides good results maintaining a low computational cost. The recognition stage is based on the Principal Components Analysis (PCA) approach which has been modified to cope with the video indexing application. After the integration of the two stages, several improvements are proposed which increase the face detection and recognition rate and the overall performance of the system. Good results have been obtained using the MPEG-7 video content set used in the MPEG-7 evaluation group.