In this paper, a novel approach derived from image gradient domain called multi-scale gradient faces (MGF) is proposed to abstract multi-scale illumination-insensitive measure for face recognition. MGF applies multi-scale analysis on image gradient information, which can discover underlying inherent structure in images and keep the details at most while removing varying lighting. The proposed approach provides state-of-the-art performance on Extended YaleB and PIE: Recognition rates of 99.11% achieved on PIE database and 99.38% achieved on YaleB which outperforms most existing approaches. Furthermore, the experimental results on noised Yale-B validate that MGF is more robust to image noise. © World Scientific Publishing Company.