The paper describes an approach to detect faces whose size and position are unknown in an image with a complex background. The candidates of faces are detected by finding out "face like" regions in the input image using the fuzzy pattern matching method. The perceptually uniform color space is used in our research in order to obtain reliable results. The skin color that is used to detect face like regions, is represented by a model developed by us called skin color distribution function. The skin color regions are then extracted by estimating a measure that describes how well the color of a pixel looks like the skin color for each pixel in the input image. The faces which appear in images are modeled as several 2 dimensional patterns. The face like regions are extracted by a fuzzy pattern matching approach using these face models. The face candidates are then verified by estimating how well the extracted facial features fit a face model which describes the geometrical relations among facial features.