Recently, subspace analysis has raised its performance to a higher level through the adoption of kernel-based nonlinearity. Especially, the radial basis function, based on its nonparametric nature, has shown promising results in face recognition. However, due to the endemic small sample size problem of face data, the conventional kernel-based feature extraction methods have difficulty in data representation. In this paper, we introduce a novel variant of the RBF kernel to alleviate this problem. By adopting the concept of the nearest feature line classifier, we show both effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed method, particularly regarding the small sample size issue.