This paper proposes a method for detecting facial regions by combining a Gabor filter and a convolutional neural network. The first stage uses the Gabor filter which extracts intrinsic facial features. As a result of this transformation we obtain four subimages. The second stage of the method concerns the application of the convolutional neural network to these four images. The approach presented in this paper yields better classification performance in comparison to the results obtained by the convolutional neural network alone.