This paper proposes a new method named Sparse Regression Analysis (SRA) for object representation and recognition. In SRA, ℓ1-norm minimization is combined with regression analysis to represent the input signal. The discriminative ability of SRA derives from the fact that the subset which most compactly expresses the input signal is activated in the regression analysis. To achieve a further improvement, Kernelized SRA (KSRA) is developed to make a nonlinear extension of SRA. The experiments are conducted on both palmprint and face recognition, which show that the proposed methods achieve a much better performance than sparse representation classifier, principal component analysis, and linear discriminant analysis.