This paper deals with the using of Improved 3D Mixed Transform (3D-IMT) for face recognition problem. The mixed transform consists; Fourier based 3D radon transform plus 1-D Wavelet transform (which is also known as 3D Ridgelet transform). The Mixed Transform is improved by using Particle swarm optimization ( PSO) , the improvement involves the selection of the best of directions for smart rectangle-to-polar transform as a part of the 3D Radon Transformation. The 3D-IMT is applied to the 3D representation of face images, and yields a few number of features, these features is projected into the maximized projection that achieves good recognition rate using the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA).