With the rapid development of the cloud computing, internet of things and artificial intelligence, terminal devices are facing great challenges in hardware resources and power consumption. In order to reduce the power consumption of computing units, two kinds of low power approximate 8-bit multipliers based on novel 4-1 compressors were proposed. Based on analysis of the errors of 4-1 compressors, an error compensation module was designed to reduce the precision loss. The simulation results show that, compared with the exact multiplier, the delay of the proposed multipliers was reduced by 5.67% and 18.23%, the area by 6.54% and 20.36%, and the power consumption by 15.83% and 30.94%, respectively. Finally, the proposed multipliers are applied to image sharpening, which verify its validity in error-tolerant applications.