A half face recognition scheme is proposed to reduce effect of variable lighting on face recognition. The scheme includes 3 stages. 1) The face images in training set are divided into the left face images and the right half face images firstly, and then they train the left feature extractor and the right feature extractor after illumination compensation respectively. 2) One half of a probe face image is chosen by entropy and its features are extracted by the corresponding feature extractor after illumination compensation. 3) The face is classified by the features of the chosen half face image. Experiment results show that, under variable lighting, the scheme not only gains the higher recognition ratio than the whole face, but also gains the higher speed.