The present invention relates to an image compression method and apparatus, where the image compression method includes a step of performing amplitude decreasing processing on a frequency domain coefficient or a quantization coefficient of a to-be-processed image. The image compression method includes: determining a texture direction of the to-be-processed image; and performing amplitude decreasing processing on the frequency domain coefficient or the quantization coefficient of the to-be-processed image according to the texture direction, where the frequency domain coefficient is a coefficient obtained after the image is transformed, and the quantization coefficient is a coefficient obtained after the frequency domain coefficient is quantized. According to embodiments of the present invention, amplitude decreasing processing is performed on a frequency domain coefficient of a to-be-processed image according to a texture direction of the to-be-processed image, which can improve the compression efficiency without affecting subjective quality of the to-be-processed image.