Due to the high dimensionality and high data redundancy of hyperspectral remote sensing images, it is difficult to maintain the nonlinear structural relationship in the dimensionality reduction representation of hyperspectral data. In this paper, a feature representation method based on high order contractive auto-encoder with nuclear norm constraint (CAE-HNC) is proposed. By introducing Jacobian matrix in the CAE of the nuclear norm constraint, the nuclear norm has better sparsity than the Frobenius norm and can better describe the local low dimension of the data manifold. At the same time, a second-order penalty term is added, which is the Frobenius norm of the Hessian matrix expressed in the hidden layer of the input, encouraging a smoother low-dimensional manifold geometry of the data. The experiment of hyperspectral remote sensing image shows that CAE-HNC proposed in this paper is a compact and robust feature representation method, which provides effective help for the ground object classification and target recognition of hyperspectral remote sensing image.