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Applications of transfer learning for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown to be an efficient alternative for solving recognition tasks rather than designing and training a new neural network from scratch. However, there exists several popular CNN architectures available for various recognition tasks. Therefore, choosing an appropriate network for a specific recognition task, specifically designed for a humanoid robotic platform, is often challenging. This study evaluates the performance of two well-known CNN architectures; AlexNet, and VGG-Face for a face recognition task. This is accomplished by applying the transfer learning concept to the networks pre-trained for different recognition tasks. The proposed face recognition framework is then implemented on a humanoid robot known as NAO to demonstrate the practicality and flexibility of the algorithm. The results suggest that the proposed pipeline shows excellent performance in recognizing a new person from a single example image under varying distance and resolution conditions usually applicable to a mobile humanoid robotic platform.