Abstract. In current face recognition approaches with convolutional neural network (CNN), a pair of faces to compare are independently fed into the CNN for feature extraction. For both faces the same kernels are applied and hence the representation of a face stays fixed regardless of whom it is compared with. As for us humans, however, one generally focuses on varied characteristics of a face when comparing it with distinct persons as shown in Figure 1. Inspired, we propose a novel CNN structure with what we referred to as contrastive convolution, which specifically focuses on the distinct characteristics between the two faces to compare, i.e., those contrastive characteristics. Extensive experiments on the challenging LFW, and IJB-A show that our proposed contrastive convolution significantly improves the vanilla CNN and achieves quite promising performance in face verification task