An image object recognition approach based on deep features and adaptive weighted joint sparse representation (D-AJSR) is proposed in this paper. D-AJSR is a data-lightweight classification framework, which can classify and recognize objects well with few training samples. In D-AJSR, the convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to extract the deep features of the training samples and test samples. Then, we use the adaptive weighted joint sparse representation to identify the objects, in which the eigenvectors are reconstructed by calculating the contribution weights of each eigenvector. Aiming at the high-dimensional problem of deep features, we use the principal component analysis (PCA) method to reduce the dimensions. Lastly, combined with the joint sparse model, the public features and private features of images are extracted from the training sample feature set so as to construct the joint feature dictionary. Based on the joint feature dictionary, sparse representation-based classifier (SRC) is used to recognize the objects. Experiments on face images and remote sensing images show that D-AJSR is superior to the traditional SRC method and some other advanced methods.