Fourier transform and linear discrimination analysis (LDA) are two commonly used techniques of image processing and recognition. Based on them, we propose a Fourier-LDA approach (FLA) for image recognition. It selects appropriate Fourier frequency bands with favorable linear separability by using a two-dimensional separability judgment. Then it extracts two-dimensional linear discriminative features to perform the classification. Our experimental results on different image data prove that FLA obtains better classification performance than other linear discrimination methods. (C) 2004 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.