The permutation coding neural classifier (PCNC) and its application to face recognition are described. Face recognition is a very important task in security applications such as those in airports and other institutions and for authentication via photo tagging in social networks. It is possible to improve face recognition with the PCNC using special types of distortion applied to the original images (for example, shifting of the images) in the training of the neural network. These distortions are applied to images in an initial image database (the FEI image database). The experiments are performed to test the performance of the PCNC on the database including the distorted image versions. We describe the FEI image database and report the image recognition results obtained.