In this paper, a feature extraction method based on two-dimensional (2D) mel-cepstrum is introduced. Feature matrices resulting from the 2D mel-cepstrum, Fourier LDA approach and original image matrices are individually applied to the Common Matrix Approach (CMA) based face recognition system. For each of these feature extraction methods, recognition rates are obtained in the AR face database, ORL database and Yale database. Experimental results indicate that recognition rates obtained by the 2D mel-cepstrum method is superior to the recognition rates obtained using Fourier LDA approach and raw image matrices. This indicates that 2D mel-cepstral analysis can be used in image feature extraction problems. © 2010 IEEE.