In this work, a new human face recognition algorithm based on bidirectional two dimensional principal component analysis (B2DPCA) and extreme learning machine (ELM) is introduced. The proposed method is based on curvelet image decomposition of human faces and a subband that exhibits a maximum standard deviation is dimensionally reduced using an improved dimensionality reduction technique. Discriminative feature sets are generated using B2DPCA to ascertain classification accuracy. Other notable contributions of the proposed work include significant improvements in classification rate, up to hundred folds reduction in training time and minimal dependence on the number of prototypes. Extensive experiments are performed using challenging databases and results are compared against state of the art techniques.