Abstract: Provided is an image compression apparatus and method. The image compression apparatus compresses a captured image by performing discrete cosine transformation on image data of the captured image and includes a prediction unit, a quantization unit, and an encoding unit. The prediction unit generates a prediction value for predicting the size of a compressed image with respect to the captured image according to the amount of high-frequency components of a first direction of image data in a previous frame of the captured image and the amount of high-frequency components of a second direction of the image data in the previous frame. The quantization unit selects a predetermined quantization table according to the generated prediction value and quantizes the discrete cosine transformed image data using the selected quantization table. The encoding unit encodes the quantized image data.