We describe a method for face recognition based on the eigenimage technique that allows images to be represented by a limited set of parameters and be compared according to simple similarity criteria for classification or retrieval purposes. Our method is not applied to the whole image of the face, but to sub-images representing the most salient face components (eyes, nose, mouth). The method is able to recognise with good precision faces having different head postures on the image plane, because faces are straightened through a rotation transform. Moreover the paper reports results we have achieved with such a method on two publicly-available reference sets of images