According to the particularity of large scale face recognition, an opto-electronic hybrid matched filtering correlator and a new method for large scale face recognition are proposed. In order to achieve 1N identification and effectively improve the speed and accuracy of the identification, opto-electronic hybrid matched filtering correlator is used to complete related calculation which consumes the most time in image recognition. At the same time, computer simulation and experiment test are used to verify this method. The computer simulation results show that the correlator can output sharp correlation peak, and has a very good recognition ability. When testing in 200 persons, the recognition threshold value is 0.6, false match rate is 0%, and false non-match rate is 1%.