With regard to the problem that recognition software does not work when the Quick Response (QR) code image is contaminated, damaged or obscured, a QR code recognition method based on sparse representation was proposed. Forty categories QR code images were used as research subjects and each category has 13 images. Three images were randomly selected from each category and thus a total of 120 images were got as the training sample and the remaining 400 as test sample. Sparse representation dictionary was composed of all training samples. The test samples were a sparse linear combination of the training samples and the coefficients were sparse. The projection of each test sample in the dictionary was calculated, so category with the smallest residual was classification category. Finally, comparison and analysis were done between the recognition results of the proposed method and the QR code recognition software PsQREdit. The experimental results show that, the proposed method is able to correctly identify for partially contaminated, damaged and obscured image, and it has good robustness. It is a new effective means for the recognition of QR code.