Illumination change is of great importance in affecting the performance of some existing face recognition algorithms.Though edge-based methods are robust to illumination variation and are easy to implement

they do not work perfectly in the cases with expression variation.In order to improve both the lighting robustness and expression robustness

a novel face recognition method based on the fusion of binary edge and grayscale features was proposed.Also the second-order mutual information was used for the similarity metric of grayscale face image for the first time.AR dataset and Yale dataset with various illumination and expression variation were tested to evaluate the effect of the proposed method.Results showed that the overall face recognition rate of the proposed method was better than that of other methods.And these results indicate that our method is more effective for practical use.