Face recognition is one of the most active areas of research in computer vision. Gabor features have been used widely in face identification because of their good results and robustness. However, the results of face identification strongly depend on how different are the test and gallery images, as is the case in varying face pose. In this paper, a new Gabor-based method is proposed which modifies the grid from which the Gabor features are extracted using a mesh to model face deformations produced by varying pose. Also, a statistical model of the scores computed by using the Gabor features is used to improve recognition performance across pose. Our method incorporates blocks for illumination compensation by a Local Normalization method, and entropy weighted Gabor features to emphasize those features that improve proper identification. The method was tested on the FERET and CMU-PIE databases. Our literature review focused on articles with face identification with wide pose variation. Our results, compared to those of the literature review, achieved the highest classification accuracy on the FERET database with 2D face recognition methods. The performance obtained in the CMU-PIE database is among those obtained by the best methods published. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.