Most of the research on face recognition addresses the MATCH problem and it assumes a closed universe where there is no need for a REJECT ('false positive') option. The SURVEILLANCE problem is addressed indirectly, if at all, through the MATCH problem, where the size of the gallery rather than that of the probe set is very large. This paper addresses the proper surveillance problem where the size of the probe ('unknown image') set vs. gallery ('known image') set is 450 vs. 50 frontal images. We developed robust face ID verification ('classification') and retrieval schemes based on hybrid classifiers and showed their feasibility using the FERET face data base. The hybrid classifier architecture consists of an ensemble of connectionist networks-Radial Basis Functions (RBF) and inductive decision trees (DT). Experimental results prove the feasibility of our approach and yield 97% accuracy using the probe and gallery sets specified above.