Automatic face detection and localization is a key problem in many computer vision tasks. In this paper, a simple yet effective approach for detecting and locating human faces in color images is proposed. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, a particular reference to face detection techniques along with a background to neural networks is given. Second, and maybe most importantly, an adaptive cubic-spline neural network is designed to be used to detect and locate human faces in uncontrolled environments. The experimental results conducted on our test set show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and it can compare favorably with other state-of-the-art approaches in the literature.