An image compression apparatus includes a tile specifying section specifying rectangular tiles having an arbitrary size with respect to an image, an image dividing section dividing the image using the specified rectangular tiles, a bit-plane decomposing section decomposing each of the specified tiles dividing the image into bit-planes, a bit-plane ordering section ordering the bit-planes decomposing each of the specified tiles depending on a coding sequence, a layer forming section forming layers by the ordered bit-planes, and a suppressing section suppressing a quantization rate of a region low relative to other regions of the image.