A method and apparatus to generate an object descriptor using extended curvature gabor filters. The method and apparatus may increase a recognition rate of even a relatively small image with use of an extended number of curvature gabor filters having controllable curvatures and may reduce the amount of calculation required for face recognition by performing the face recognition using only some of the extended curvature gabor filters which have a great effect on the recognition rate. The object descriptor generating method includes extracting gabor features from an input object image by applying a plurality of curvature gabor filters, generated via combination of a plurality of curvatures and a plurality of Gaussian magnitudes, to the object image, and generating an object descriptor for object recognition by projecting the extracted features onto a predetermined base vector.