In this study, polynomial-based radial basis function neural networks are proposed as one of the functional components of the overall face recognition system. The system consists of the preprocessing and recognition module. The design methodology and resulting procedure of the proposed P-RBF NNs are presented. The structure helps construct a solution to high-dimensional pattern recognition problems. In data preprocessing part, principal component analysis (PCA) is generally used in face recognition. It is useful in reducing the dimensionality of the feature space. However, because it is concerned with the overall face image, it cannot guarantee the same classification rate when changing viewpoints. To compensate for these limitations, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is used to enhance the separation between different classes. In this paper, we elaborate on the PCA-LDA algorithm and design an optimal P-RBF NNs for the recognition module.The proposed P-RBF NNs architecture consists of three functional modules such as the condition part, the conclusion part, and the inference part realized in terms of fuzzy “if–then” rules. In the condition part of fuzzy rules, the input space is partitioned with the use of fuzzy clustering realized by means of the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm. In the conclusion part of rules, the connection weight is realized through three types of polynomials such as constant, linear, and quadratic. The coefficients of the P-RBF NNs model are obtained by fuzzy inference method forming the inference part of fuzzy rules. The essential design parameters (including learning rate, momentum, fuzzification coefficient, and the feature selection mechanism) of the networks are optimized by means of differential evolution (DE). The experimental results completed on benchmark face datasets – the AT&T, and Yale datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of PCA-LDA combined algorithm compared with other algorithms such as PCA, LPP, 2D-PCA and 2D-LPP. A real time face recognition system realized in this way is also presented.