discrete wavelet transform has both g ood qualities in time domain and frequency domain which is an ideal tool in analyzin g unsteady si g nals. Discrete cosine transform is one of the approaches used in ima g e compressin g which is also used to extract features. This paper proposes a combined feature extraction method which is based on DWT and DCT for face reco g nition. First the ori g inal face ima g e is decomposed by 2dimentional DWT, then the 2-dimentional DCT is applied to the low frequency approximation ima g e obtained from previous step. In the end, usin g the DCT coefficient, a SVM classifier is built and face ima g e can be reco g nized. The experiment carried on ORL-DATABASE shows that the above-mentioned feature extraction method can g ain hi g her reco g nition rate than the traditional PCA al g orithm.