This paper presents a brief review of techniques of two specific areas of digital image processing. One is image compression and other is face recognition. Image compression deals with the problem of reducing the amount of data required to represent a digital image. Image compression techniques are the most concerned topics in today’s technological developments. Image compression reduces the data from the image in either lossless or lossy way. This study presents overview of image compression and face recognition techniques. Face recognition is a necessity of the modern age as the need for identification of individual has increased with the globalization of the world. Personal authentication through face has been under research since last two decades. The performance of the face recognition system has been enhanced using various algorithms. This paper provides an overview of different face recognition approaches.