Collaborative representation based classification (CRC) is an efficient classifier in image classification. By using l2 regularization, the collaborative representation based classifier holds competitive performances compared with the sparse representation based classifier using less computational time. However, each of the elements calculated from the training samples are utilized for representation without selection, which can lead to poor performances in some classification tasks. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel collaborative representation by directly using non-negative representations to represent a test sample collaboratively, termed Non-negative Collaborative Representation-based Classifier (NCRC). To collect all non-negative collaborative representations, we introduce a Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) function to perform filtering on the coefficients obtained by l2 minimization according to CRC’s objective function. Next, we represent the test sample by using a linear combination of these representations. Lastly, the nearest subspace classifier is used to perform classification on the test samples. The experiments performed on four different databases including face and palmprint showed the promising results of the proposed method. Accuracy comparisons with other state-of-art sparse representation-based classifiers demonstrated the effectiveness of NCRC at image classification. In addition, the proposed NCRC consumes less computational time, further illustrating the efficiency of NCRC.