Abstract: As a new representation approach, collaborative representation was employed to collaboratively represent the query image by all training images from all classes. In this paper, a novel face recognition algorithm using collaborative representation based on the binary bit-plane images had been proposed. The original gray images are firstly equalized and decomposed into 8 bit-plane images. And then the new virtual face images, which contained more discrimination information, were constructed by the 8 bit-plane images and the weight vector that was calculated by the recognition rate and the order of the bit-plane. Finally the collaborative representation was performed on the virtual face images. Experimental results show the proposed combination approach has very competitive classification rate and recognition speed.