Compared with the conventional multi-scroll attractor, the multi-wing butterfly chaotic attractors are easier to design and implement through analog circuitry, thus they has more potential applications. In this paper, a chaotic system with four-wing attractors is designed and the dynamic behaviors are analyzed in terms of phase diagram, bifurcation diagram, Lyapunov exponential spectrum and C 0 structural complexity. It is found that each parameter has a large range of intervals that can keep the system in a chaotic state and the generated sequences have sufficient randomness to be well suited for applications in secure communications. Then, the circuit model of the constructed four-wing chaotic system is built with a basic operational amplifier circuit, and the accuracy of the circuit implementation is verified. Finally, a color image compression encryption scheme is designed based on the theory of compressive sensing and DNA dynamic coding. The algorithm is mainly composed of five parts: sparse, compression calculation, 3D projection scrambling, DNA diffusion and plaintext association confusion. The security test results show that the designed scheme not only has superior compression performance and high security, but also has no limitation on the size of the test image.