This application discloses a channel estimation method and apparatus, and relates to the field of communications technologies, to help reduce indication overheads. The method may include: generating and sending indication information. The indication information is used to indicate K N-dimensional spatial-domain component vectors, L M-dimensional frequency-domain component vectors, and a weight matrix, to indicate to construct an M×N-dimensional spatial-frequency matrix, or an M×N or N×M spatial-frequency matrix.