The purpose of this study was to discriminate between left- and right-hand motor imagery tasks. We recorded the brain signals from two participants using a fNIRS system and compared different feature extraction (mean, peak, minimum, skewness and kurtosis) and classification techniques (linear (LDA) and quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression, K-nearest-neighbor (KNN), and neural networks with Levenberg-Marquardt (LMA), Bayesian Regularization (BRANN) and Scaled Conjugate Gradient (SCGA) training algorithms). The results showed poor classification accuracies (<58%) when skewness and kurtosis were used. When mean, peak, and minimum were used as features, QDA, SVM and KNN produced higher classification accuracies relative to LDA and logistic regression. Overall, BRANN led to the highest accuracies (>98%) when mean, peak and minimum were used as features.