This letter presents a new feature extraction method based on the private energy map (PEM) technique to utilize the energy characteristics of a facial image. Compared with a non-facial image, a facial image shows large energy congestion in special regions of discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients. The PEM is generated by energy probability of the DCT coefficients of facial images. In experiments, higher face recognition performance figures of 100% for the ORL database and 98.8% for the ETRI database have been achieved.