The problem of recognizing human faces from frontal views with varying illumination, occlusion, and disguise is a great challenge to pattern recognition. A general knowledge is that face patterns from an objective set sit on a linear subspace. On the proof of the knowledge, some methods use the linear combination to represent a sample in face recognition. In this paper, in order to get the more discriminant information of reconstruction error, we constrain both the linear combination coefficients and the reconstruction error by l(1)-minimization which is not apt to be disturbed by outliners. Then, through an equivalent transformation of the model, it is convenient to compute the parameters in a new underdetermined linear system. Next, we use an optimization method to get the approximate solution. As a result, the minimum reconstruction error has contained much valuable discriminating information. The gradient of this variable is measured to decide the final recognition. The experiments show that the recognition protocol based on the reconstruction error achieves high performance on available databases (Extended Yale B and AR Face database).