A new method for large-scale face recognition is proposed. In order to realize 1N identification, optical joint transform correlator is used to complete related calculation which consuming the largest time in image recognition, and electrical method is used to subtract power spectrum. By combining the computer pattern′s high accuracy with the optical pattern′s high speed, the recognition′s speed and accuracy are improved. An evaluation criteria is also established to evaluate the recognition performance of this method. The computer simulation results show that the method can eliminate the central zero-order diffraction and sharp auto-correlation peak. When the recognition threshold value is in ［0.61,0.62］, both false match rate and false non-match rate are 0.