We studied the effects of fractional fourier transform in face recognition, in which only the amplitude spectra of transformed facial images were used.We used two recently developed face recognition methods, the most effective feature (MEF) method (i.e., eigenface method) and most discriminating feature (MDF) method, and the effects of th etransform for th etwo methods were consistent. We confirmed that the recognition rate by the use of MDF method is better than that consistent. We confirmed that the recognition rate by the use of MDF method is better than that by MEF regardless of the order to transform, these methods provided slightly better results when the order was 1 than for any other order values. Only when the order was close to 1, the recognition rates were robust to the shift of the input images, and the trend that the recognition rates decreased as the input size varied was independent of the order. From these results, we fond that it is most advantageous to use the amplitude spectra of the conventional fourier transform whose order is 1.