A new face recognition method based on local Gabor phase characteristic fusion and fisher linear discriminant analysis is proposed. In our proposed method, according to the good spatial position and orientation of Gabor filter, a Gabor filter with four frequencies and six orientations is firstly applied to filter face images. Based on Daugman’s method and the local Exclusive-or (XOR) pattern, local Gabor patterns are then extracted to form the characteristic images. Finally, fisher linear discriminant analysis is used to project the characteristic images of each spatial position and orientation into low dimensional space. Neighbor classifier is adopted to the fused projected characteristics to get the recognition result. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms other recognition method based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), fisher linear discriminant analysis and Gabor magnitude pattern fusion.