This paper proposes a technique for principal component analysis (PCA) to raise the recognition rate of a front face in a low dimension by hierarchical image and parallel processing structure. The conventional PCA shows a recognition rate of less than 50% in a low dimension (dimensions 1 to 6) when used for facial recognition. In this paper, a face is formed as images of 3 fixed-size levels: the 1st being a region around the nose, the 2nd level a region including the eyes, nose, and mouth, and the 3rd level image is the whole face. PCA of the 3-level images is treated by parallel processing structure, and finally their similarities are combined for high recognition rate in a low dimension. The proposed method under went experimental feasibility study with ORL face database for evaluation of the face recognition function. The experimental demonstration has been done by PCA and the proposed method according to each level. The proposed method showed high recognition of over 50% from dimensions 1 to 6.