The invention discloses a 3D palmprint identification method. In the method, only the local features of blocks of a 3D palmprint, namely, a phase and surface type block histogram, are adopted. A 3D palmprint feature model is proposed. The identification effect is improved, and moreover, the use of a 2D palmprint image is avoided so that the whole system is free from the influence of light intensity and scratch marks. The local features of the 3D palmprint adopted are robust to small translation, rotation and even zooming of images, so that there is no need to use multiple translation, nearestiteration, cross-correlation and other methods for image alignment, and the identification efficiency is improved. An intermediate term is added in a sparse representation classifier, and an improvedsparse representation classifier is proposed by improving the sparse coefficient. The sparse coefficient can be calculated before 3D palmprint classification, and a subspace method is used to compareimages in the classification process. Thus, when there are a lot of samples in the training library, there is no need to compare testing samples and training samples one by one. The data redundancy, computation and processing time are reduced.