In this paper, we consider the common problem of automatically recognizing palmprint with varying illumination and image noise. Gabor wavelets can be well represented for biometric image for their similar characteristics to human visual system. However, these Gabor-based algorithms are not robust for image recognition under non-uniform illumination and noise corruption. To improve the recognition performance under the low quality conditions, we propose novel palmprint recognition approach using directional representations. Firstly, the directional representation for palmprint appearance is obtained by the anisotropy filter, which is robust to drastic illumination changes and preserves important discriminative information. Then, the PCA is employed to reduce the dimension of image feature. At last, based on a sparse representation on palmprint feature, the compressed sensing is used to distinguish palms from different hands. Experimental results on the PolyU palprint database show the proposed algorithm have better performance. And the proposed scheme is robust to varying illumination and noise corruption.