For obtaining more extensive sampling information,this paper presents a novel approach based on improved local directional pattern(ILDP) for face recognition,which adopts the edge gradient information of local #-shape neighborhood including 16 pixels.Specially,the local #-shape neighborhood of each pixel is equally divided into two 3×3 sub-neighborhoods,and 8 edge gradient values of each sub-neighborhood are gained by convolving it with 8 Kirsch masks respectively.The ILDP just utilizes the direction of the largest edge gradient value of each sub-neighborhood.Then,these two directions are encoded into a double-digit octal number to produce the ILDP code.Finally,the face descriptor is represented by using the global concatenated histogram based on ILDP map extracted from the face image which is divided into several sub-blocks.The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method in this paper is more robust to random noise than other single face descriptors based on local texture information.