Representation-based classification methods such as sparse representation-based classification (SRC) and linear regression classification (LRC) have attracted a lot of attentions. In order to obtain the better representation, a novel method called projection representation-based classification (PRC) is proposed for image recognition in this paper. PRC is based on a new mathematical model. This model denotes that the ’ideal projection’ of a sample point x on the hyper-space H may be gained by iteratively computing the projection of x on a line of hyper-space H with the proper strategy. Therefore, PRC is able to iteratively approximate the ’ideal representation’ of each subject for classification. Moreover, the discriminant PRC (DPRC) is further proposed, which obtains the discriminant information by maximizing the ratio of the betweenclass reconstruction error over the within-class reconstruction error. Experimental results on five typical databases show that the proposed PRC and DPRC are effective and outperform other state-of-the-art methods on several vision recognition tasks