A fast method for face recognition based on eigencurves is presented in this paper.First all faces with different poses and sizes are located and normalized.Then several kinds of eigencurves are built to describe characteristics of faces.And finally,the dominant characteristics are extracted which are composed of representative vectors of faces through analyzing the eigencurves using Fourier describer.This method has been tested on 1300 facial images and shown a good performance of speed and accuracy,and the result also shows it is robust for various head poses and expressions.