Two-dimensional (2D) discrimination analysis using methods such as 2D PCA and Image LDA is of interest in face recognition because it extracts discriminative features faster than one-dimensional (1D) discrimination analysis. However, existing 2D methods generally use more discriminative features and take longer to test than 1D methods. 2D PCA in particular cannot make full use of the Fisher discriminant criterion. Image LDA also has drawbacks in that it cannot perform 2D principal component analysis and discards components with poor discriminative capabilities. In addition, existing 2D methods cannot provide an automatic strategy to choose 2D principal components or discriminant vectors. In this paper, we propose 2D Fisherface, a novel discrimination approach that combines the two-stage "PCA + LDA" strategy and 2D discrimination techniques. It can extract face discriminative features by automatically selecting two-dimensional principal components and discriminant vectors. Using the AR database as the test data, it is shown that the proposed approach is faster and more effective than several representative 1D and 2D discrimination methods.