Face recognition has a great potential to play an important role in computer vision field. However, the majority of face recognition methods are based on the low-level features, which may not yield good results. Inspired by a simple deep learning model principal component analysis network (PCANet), we propose a novel deep learning network called circular symmetrical Gabor filter (2D)2PCA neural networks [CSGF(2D)2PCANet]. Previous models used in face recognition have three major issues of data redundancy, computation time, and no rotation invariance. We introduce the CSGF to address these issues. Two-directional 2-D PCA [(2D)2PCA] is used in feature extraction stage. Binary hashing, blockwise histograms, and linear SVM are used for the output stage. The proposed CSGF (2D)2PCANet learns high-level features and provides more recognition information during the training phase, which may result in a higher recognition rate when testing the sample. We tested the proposed method on XM2VTS, ORL, AR, Extend Yale B, and LFW databases. Test results show that the CSGF (2D)2PCANet is more robust to the variation of occlusion, illumination, pose, noise, and expression, which is a promising method in face recognition.