In this paper, feature extraction methods, which is one field of reducing dimensions of high-dimensional data, are empirically investigated. We selected the traditional PCA(Principal Component Analysis), ICA(Independent Component Analysis), NMF(Non-negative Matrix Factorization), and sNMF(Sparse NMF) for comparisons. ICA has a similar feature with the simple cell of V1. NMF implemented a "parts-based representation in the brain" and sNMF is a improved version of NMF. In order to visually investigate the extracted features, handwritten digits are handled. Also, the extracted features are used to train multi-layer perceptrons for recognition test. The characteristic of each feature extraction method will be useful when applying feature extraction methods to many real-world problems.