In this paper, the method of kernel Fisher discriminant (KFD) is analyzed and its nature is revealed, i.e., KFD is equivalent to kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) plus Fisher linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Based on this result, a more transparent KFD algorithm is proposed. That is, KPCA is first performed and then LDA is used for a second feature extraction in the KPCA-transformed space. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified using the CENPARMI handwritten numeral database.