Summary: An efficient feature extraction method named as Constrained Maximum Variance Mapping (CMVM) is developed. The proposed algorithm can be viewed as a linear approximation of multi-manifolds learning based approach, which takes the local geometry and manifold labels into account. The CMVM and the original manifold learning based approaches have a point in common that the locality is preserved. Moreover, the CMVM is globally maximizing the distances between different manifolds. After the local scatters have been characterized, the proposed method focuses on developing a linear transformation that can maximize the dissimilarities between all the manifolds under the constraint of locality preserving. Compared to most of the up-to-date manifold learning based methods, this trick makes contribution to pattern classification from two aspects. On the one hand, the local structure in each manifold is still kept; on the other hand, the discriminant information between manifolds can be explored. Finally, FERET face database, CMU PIE face database and USPS handwriting data are all taken to examine the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Experimental results validate that the proposed approach is superior to other feature extraction methods, such as linear discriminant analysis, locality preserving projection, unsupervised discriminant projection and maximum variance projection.