Embodiments of this application disclose a channel estimation method and apparatus, and relate to the field of communications technologies, to help reduce indication overheads. The method may include: generating and sending indication information, where the indication information is used to indicate M N-dimensional precoding vectors, each precoding vector is applied to one of M frequency bands, the M N-dimensional precoding vectors form a space-frequency matrix, and the space-frequency matrix is generated by performing weighted combination on a plurality of space-frequency component matrices, where the space-frequency matrix is an M×N-dimensional space-frequency vector or an X×Y space-frequency matrix, X and Y are one and the other of M and N, M≥1, N≥2, and both M and N are integers.