In this paper, the properties of the all phase biorthogonal transform (APBT) matrix are deduced based on the concepts of all phase biorthogonal transform. A novel algorithm is presented to compress color image using the all phase Walsh biorthogonal transform (APWBT), the all phase discrete cosine biorthogonal transform (APDCBT) and the all phase inverse discrete cosine biorthogona transform (APIDCBT), instead of the conventional discrete cosine transform (DCT). Compared with the DCT-based JPEG image compression algorithm, we use the all phase biorthogonal transform matrix to reduce inter-pixel redundancy and propose uniform quantization to the APBT coefficients aiming at reducing the computation complexity. Experimental results show that the CPSNR of the proposed algorithm performs close to the DCT and outperforms the DCT at low bit rates especially. © 2013 Binary Information Press.