There is various human biometrics used nowadays, one of the most important of these biometrics is the face. Many techniques have been suggested for face recognition, but they still face a variety of challenges for recognizing faces in images captured in the uncontrolled environment, and for real-life applications. Some of these challenges are pose variation, occlusion, facial expression, illumination, bad lighting, and image quality. New techniques are updating continuously. In this paper, the singular value decomposition is used to extract the features matrix for face recognition and classification. The input color image is converted into a grayscale image and then transformed into a local ternary pattern before splitting the image into the main sixteen blocks. Each block of these sixteen blocks is divided into more to thirty sub-blocks. For each sub-block, the SVD transformation is applied, and the norm of the diagonal matrix is calculated, which is used to create the 16x30 feature matrix. The sub-blocks of two images, (thirty elements in the main block) are compared with others using the Euclidean distance. The minimum value for each main block is selected to be one feature input to the neural network. Classification is implemented by a backpropagation neural network, where a 16-feature matrix is used as input to the neural network. The performance of the current proposal was up to 97% when using the FEI (Brazilian) database. Moreover, the performance of this study is promised when compared with recent state-of-the-art approaches and it solves some of the challenges such as illumination and facial expression.
