This paper presents a new Sobel-LBP, an extension of existing Local Binary Pattern (LBP), for facial image representation. The face image is filtered by Sobel operator to enhance the edge information. Sobel-LBP feature distributions are then extracted and concatenated into a spatial histogram to be used as a face descriptor. The proposed method is compared with the original LBP on both gray-level images and Gabor real and imaginary features for face recognition. The experimental results indicate that Sobel-LBP provides a significantly better performance than LBP under various conditions.