A methodology is described to reduce the complexity of filters for face recognition by reducing the memory requirement to, for example, 2 bits/pixel in the frequency domain. Reduced-complexity correlations are achieved by having quantized MACE, UMACE, OTSDF, UOTSDF, MACH, and other filters, in conjunction with a quantized Fourier transform of the input image. This reduces complexity in comparison to the advanced correlation filters using full-phase correlation. However, the verification performance of the reduced complexity filters is comparable to that of full-complexity filters. A special case of using 4-phases to represent both the filter and training/test images in the Fourier domain leads to further reductions in the computational formulations. This also enables the storage and synthesis of filters in limited-memory and limited-computational power platforms such as PDAs, cell phones, etc. An online training algorithm implemented on a face verification system is described for synthesizing correlation filters to handle pose/scale variations. A way to perform efficient face localization is also discussed. Because of the rules governing abstracts, this abstract should not be used to construe the claims.