Abstract: In order to detect and eliminate illumination effect, a tensor-based face recognition method is proposed in this paper. In this work, the effect of illuminations is effectively reduced by edge suppression method and gradient field transformation. The use of gradient is taken into account in calculating the direction of the shadows.. In the recognition phase, Principal component analysis is used for feature extraction. The K-nearest-neighbour rule is applied for classification. Experiments are carried out upon the real time as well as standard databases, and the results reveal that the proposed method achieves satisfactory recognition rates under varying illumination conditions.