In this paper, we consider the problem of classifying a real world image to the corresponding object class based on its visual content via sparse representation, which is originally used as a powerful tool for acquiring, representing and compressing high-dimensional signals. Assuming the intuitive hypothesis that an image could be represented by a linear combination of the training images from the same class, we propose a novel approach for visual object categorization in which a sparse representation of the image is first of all obtained by solving a l1 or l0-minimization problem and then fed into a traditional classifier such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) to finally perform the specified task. Experimental results obtained on the SIMPLIcity database have shown that this new approach can improve the classification performance compared to standard SVM using directly features extracted from the image.