Objective To study the color image compression technology based on human perception characteristics. Methods Combined with human visual characteristics and its mathematic model, based on the color image frequency spectrum characteristics, an image compression scheme was proposed to be suitable for color image, and the simulation experiments were carried out with three different compression ratios. Results In the color image compression scheme proposed, the compression ratio could reach 15∶1 under the conditions of not affecting the human observation by comparison and analysis. When the compression ratio reached 64.1538∶ 1, the decompressed image could still achieve a relatively good visual effect in a certain range of error, and the PSNR could reach more than 30 dB. Conclusion Experiment results showed that the proposed compression algorithm scheme could achieve relatively high compression ratios under the premise of image compression quality, which could completely meet the requirement of color image storage and transmission in real life.