Face and fingerprint recognition, the two most popular biometric identification technologies, are widely used in recent years due to their simplicity, rapidity and safety. However, the accuracy and robustness of the biometric identification systems using a single feature need to be improved further. Meanwhile, these systems are easy to be cracked by forged faces or fingerprints. Thus, multimodal biometric recognition methods by fusing faces and fingerprints were focued. A review on the researches of face and fingerprint recognition technologies was afforded, and then the challenges of monomodal biometric recognition was summerized. On this basis, the multimodal biometric recognition methods by fusing faces and fingerprints were described to solve the defects of the monomodal biometric recognition. Finally, the future developments of the multimodal biometric recognition methods were presented.