With the development of the hyperspectral imaging technique, hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is receiving more and more attention. However, due to high dimensionality, limited or unbalanced training samples, spectral variability, and mixing pixels, it is challenging to achieve satisfactory performance for HSI classification. In order to overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a feature extraction method called spatial perception correntropy matrix (SPCM), which makes use of spatial and spectral correlation simultaneously to improve the classification accuracy and robustness. Specifically, the dimension reduction is carried out firstly. Then, the spatial perception method is designed to select the local neighbour pixels. Thus, local spectral-spatial correlation is characterized by the correntropy matrix constructed using the selected neighbourhoods. Finally, SPCM representations are fed into the support vector machine for classification. The extensive experiments carried out on three widely used data sets have revealed that the proposed SPCM performs better than several state-of-the-art methods, especially when the training set is small.