In this paper, we presented a novel approach for automatic 3D face verification from range data. The method consists of range data registration and comparison. There are two steps in registration procedure: the coarse step conducting the normalization by exploiting a priori knowledge of the human face and facial features, and the fine step aligning the input data with the model stored in the database by the partial directed Hausdorff distance. To speed up the registration, a simplified version of the model is generated for each model in the model database. During the face comparison, the partial Hausdorff distance is employed as the similarity metric. The experiments are carried out on a database with 30 individuals, and the best EER of 3.24% is achieved.