Due to the demand of fast recovery of 3D face, a recovery system based on non-Lambertian shape from shading (NL-SFS) approach was designed. Firstly, the non-Lambertian reflectance model was used to characterize the face, which was very closed to the actual reflectance property. Then, under a light source the face image was acquired by a camera whose projection mode was orthographic. The image irradiance equation for the face was derived under the assumption that the direction of the camera was the same as the light source. Furthermore, the equation was formulated into an Eikonal equation which included the shape of the face. Lastly, according to its characteristic, the system software was developed by using the fast marching method. The software can compute the solution of the equation, and then the 3D shape of the face was obtained. Experimental results demonstrated that the designed system could fastly achieve high recovery accuracy, which is 0.43% mean relative error within 0.9 s.