In order to solve the problem of poor accuracy of 3D palmprint feature representation, a 3D palmprint recognition method based on local orientation binary pattern (LOBP) and collaborative representation (CR) is proposed in this paper. The principal orientation coding and orientation confidence coding of palmprints are used to jointly characterize the directional features of 3D palmprints. This operation can effectively improve the accuracy of directional coding. The surface type coding is used to describe the structure of palmprint and fully express the geometric characteristics of palmprint. Finally, the features are combined by collaborative representation method to complete palmprint recognition in the classification and recognition. The experiment is carried out on the 3D palmprint database of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the results indicate that the average recognition rate is up to 99.55% and the average recognition time is 0.874 9 s. The proposed method can improve the recognition accuracy of 3D palmprints while maintaining a relatively low recognition time.