In this work, we have introduced a feature extraction method based on Chain Code Histogram (CCH) for facial images. A face verification (FV) system has been developed by using CCH feature. The performance of the above system is comparable with that of subspace analysis methods, i.e. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) under degraded condition. All the experimental results are shown upon a subset of IITG MV multi-biometric database which is a real time degraded office environment database. Finally, a better improved verification performance is reported by using the combination of both features which strongly validates the different information representation of both methods. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.