In face recognition, sometimes the number of available training samples for single category is insufficient. Therefore, the performances of models trained by convolutional neural network are not ideal. The small sample face recognition algorithm based on novel Siamese network is proposed in this paper, which doesn't need rich samples for training. The algorithm designs and realizes a new Siamese network model, SiameseFace1, which uses pairs of face images as inputs and maps them to target space so that the L2 norm distance in target space can represent the semantic distance in input space. The mapping is represented by the neural network in supervised learning. Moreover, a more lightweight Siamese network model, SiameseFace2, is designed to reduce the network parameters without losing accuracy. We also present a new method to generate training data and expand the number of training samples for single category in AR and labeled faces in the wild (LFW) datasets, which improves the recognition accuracy of the models. Four loss functions are adopted to carry out experiments on AR and LFW datasets. The results show that the contrastive loss function combined with new Siamese network model in this paper can effectively improve the accuracy of face recognition. © 2018 KIPS.