Some biomedical images show a large quantity of different junctions and sharp corners. It is possible to classify several types of biomedical images in a region covariance approach. Cancer cell line images are divided into small blocks and covariance matrices of image blocks are computed. Eigen-values of the covariance matrices are used as classification parameters in a Bayesian framework using the sparsity of the parameters in a transform domain. The efficiency of the proposed method over classification using standard Support Vector Machines (SVM) is demonstrated on biomedical image data. © 2011 EURASIP.