We present a novel feature extraction method named local patterns of gradients (LPOGs) for robust face recognition. LPOG uses block-wised elliptical local binary patterns (BELBP), a refined variant of ELBP, and local phase quantization (LPQ) operators directly on gradient images for capturing local texture patterns to build up a feature vector of a face image. From one input image, two directional gradient images are computed. A symmetric pair of BELBP and a LPQ operator are then separately applied upon each gradient image to generate local patterns images.