A novel unsupervised approach for regions of interest (ROI) extraction that combines the modified visual attention model and clustering analysis method is proposed. Then the non-uniform color image compression algorithm is followed to compress ROI and other regions with different compression ratios through the JPEG image compression algorithm. The reconstruction algorithm of the compressed image is similar to that of the JPEG algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance in terms of compression ratio and fidelity when comparing with other traditional approaches.