This paper proposes a novel descriptor called Mean-Variance-Median based LBP (MVM-LBP). The Median binary pattern (MBP) calculates the difference between median of all the pixels in a 3 × 3 pixel window and respective eight neighbours is used. The main draw back of MBP is that two different pixel windows can have same MBP code which is not appropriate in face recognition systems. To improve the performance of the system, the proposed descriptor (MVM-LBP) involves more statistics and uses the mean, variance, and median values of all the pixels in a 3 × 3 pixel window to get a more robust feature vector. To check the excellence the of the proposed descriptor, the proposed method is applied on two publicly available facial data sets AT&T, and faces94. The outcomes show that the proposed descriptor gives encouraging results.