  By coding a query sample as a sparse linear combination of all training
samples and then classifying it by evaluating which class leads to the minimal
coding residual, sparse representation based classification (SRC) leads to
interesting results for robust face recognition. It is widely believed that the
l1- norm sparsity constraint on coding coefficients plays a key role in the
success of SRC, while its use of all training samples to collaboratively
represent the query sample is rather ignored. In this paper we discuss how SRC
works, and show that the collaborative representation mechanism used in SRC is
much more crucial to its success of face classification. The SRC is a special
case of collaborative representation based classification (CRC), which has
various instantiations by applying different norms to the coding residual and
coding coefficient. More specifically, the l1 or l2 norm characterization of
coding residual is related to the robustness of CRC to outlier facial pixels,
while the l1 or l2 norm characterization of coding coefficient is related to
the degree of discrimination of facial features. Extensive experiments were
conducted to verify the face recognition accuracy and efficiency of CRC with
different instantiations.
