In this paper, a novel curvelet based digital image compression scheme is proposed. Aiming at achieving high compression ratio, the proposed scheme embeds a representative machine learning method, core vector machine (CVM), in the encoding process of the image compression technique. The core vector machine (CVM) has been introduced as an extremely fast classifier which is demonstrably superior to standard support vector machine (SVM) on very large datasets. In this scheme, we appropriately utilize the characteristic of CVM to reduce huge numbers of curvelet coefficients. Compared with image compression algorithms do not use CVM and methods based on wavelet transform, experimental results show that the compression performance of our method gains much improvement in peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) and CPU time. Moreover, the algorithm works fairly well for declining block effect at higher compression ratios.