Abstract This work focuses on the design and validation of a CBR system for efficient face recognition under partial occlusion conditions. The proposed CBR system is based on a classical distance-based classification method, modified to increase its robustness to partial occlusion. This is achieved by using a novel dissimilarity function which discards features coming from occluded facial regions. In addition, we explore the integration of an efficient dimensionality reduction method into the proposed framework to reduce computational cost. We present experimental results showing that the proposed CBR system outperforms classical methods of similar computational requirements in the task of face recognition under partial occlusion.