This paper proposes a face recognition system based on steerable pyramid transform (SPT) and local directional pattern (LDP) for e-health secured login in cloud domain. In an e-health login, patients periodically forget their self-made login username and password. This face recognition system can replace the traditional login system. In the proposed system, SPT can decompose a face image into several sub-bands of different scales and orientations, and LDP can encode the sub-bands in binary texture pattern. The LDP binary pattern was obtained by computing the edge response values in all eight directions at each pixel position and generating a code from the relative strength magnitude. Therefore, SPT–LDP design represents a face image in a robust way which includes multiple information sources from different scales and orientations. The proposed system is tested on standard benchmark facial recognition technology (FERET) and extended Yale-B databases. Further, the efficiency of the proposed system is proved by comparing recognition rates with other existing descriptor based methods. From the experimental results it is observed that the proposed system achieves 99.79% recognition in fb set, 90.72% in fc set, 84.97% in dup I set, and 87.69% in dup II set for FERET database and 100% in sub2 set, 100% in sub3 set, 96% in sub4 set and 95% in sub5 set for extended Yale-B database which is better than the existing methods. © 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.