This document proposes a local receptive fields based extreme learning machine (ELM-LRF) for face recognition. ELM-LRF introduces local receptive fields to the input layer of an ELM for locally connected neural networks. It is tested on three face datasets: Caltech, CBCL, and UFI. ELM-LRF achieves high testing accuracies of 98.15%, 98.34%, and 66.11% respectively, outperforming other methods. The key advantages of ELM-LRF are that it reduces training time, provides fast results with no risk of getting stuck in local minima like backpropagation algorithms.