Abstract: Various systems and methods are provided for face recognition. In one embodiment, a method includes assigning a texton to each pixel of a filtered image to produce a texton map; determining an approximation error for each pixel of the texton map; segmenting the texton map into a plurality of sub-blocks, each sub-block associated with a plurality of pixels of the texton map; determining an average error for at least one sub-block based upon the approximation errors of the pixels associated with the at least one sub-block; determining a weight for the at least one sub-block based upon the average error; assigning the weight to the textons assigned to the pixels associated with the at least one sub-block; and producing an error encoded histogram based upon the textons and the assigned weights.