In this paper, a novel approach for face recognition based on the difference vector plus kernel PCA is proposed. Difference vector is the difference between the original image and the common vector which is obtained by the images processed by the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization and represents the common invariant properties of the class. The optimal feature vectors are obtained by KPCA procedure for the difference vectors. Recognition result is derived from finding the minimum distance between the test difference feature vectors and the training difference feature vectors. To test and evaluate the proposed approach performance, a series of experiments are performed on four face databases: ORL, Yale, FERET and AR face databases and the experimental results show that the proposed method is encouraging.