A set of so-called cortical images, motivated by the function of simple cells in the primary visual cortex of mammals, is computed from each of two input images and an image pyramid is constructed for each cortical image. The two sets of cortical image pyramids are matched synchronously and an optimal mapping of the one image onto the other image is determined. The method was implemented on the Connection Machine CM-5 of the University of Groningen(1) in the data-parallel programming model and applied to the problem of face recognition.