To improve the capability of a traditional sparse representation-based classifier (SRC), we propose a novel dissimilarity-weighted SRC (DWSRC) for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. In particular, DWSRC computes the weights for each atom according to the distance or dissimilarity information between the test pixel and the atoms. First, a locality constraint dictionary set is constructed by the Gaussian kernel distance with a suitable distance metric (e.g., Euclidean distance). Second, the test pixel is sparsely coded over the new weighted dictionary set based on the $\ell _{1}$ -norm minimization problem. Finally, the test pixel is classified by using the obtained sparse coefficients with the minimal residual rule. Experimental results on two widely used public HSIs demonstrate that the proposed DWSRC is more efficient and accurate than other state-of-the-art SRCs.