Abstract In many real-world face recognition scenarios, face images can hardly be aligned accurately due to complex appearance variations or low-quality images. To address this issue, we propose a new approach to extract robust face region descriptors. Speci?cally, we divide each image (resp. video) into several spatial blocks (resp. spatial-temporal volumes) and then represent each block (resp. volume) by sum-pooling the nonnegative sparse codes of position-free patches sampled within the block (resp. volume). Whitened Principal Component Analysis (WPCA) is further utilized to reduce the feature dimension, which leads to our Spatial Face Region Descriptor (SFRD) (resp. Spatial-Temporal Face Region Descriptor, STFRD) for images (resp. videos). Moreover, we develop a new distance metric learning method for face veri?cation called Pairwise-constrained Multiple Metric Learning (PMML) to effectively integrate the face region descriptors of all blocks (resp. volumes) from an image (resp. a video). Our work achieves the stateof-the-art performances on two real-world datasets LFW and YouTube Faces (YTF) according to the restricted protocol.