The invention provides a large image classification method based on sparse coding K nearest neighbor histograms, and belongs to the technical field of pattern recognition and information processing. According to the image feature expression provided by the method, histogram statistics is conducted on different scales, and the feature information of all regions of an image is captured to a great extent, so that the obtained image feature has translation invariance, and various deformed images can be distinguished effectively; the accuracy of a large image classification task is improved with image expression as concise as possible, the image expression is extremely concise in the image processing process, the computing complexity is low, and meanwhile, very high robustness is provided for image deformation.