The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for estimating and compensating IQ imbalance of a baseband sampling digital communication receiver in digital time domain. Specifically, after an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in the baseband sampling system, a structure including a crosstalk gain estimator, a Q-path gain estimator, an IQ imbalance compensator, and a lock detector is utilized to execute IQ imbalance estimation and compensation. In contrast to real-time frequency domain estimator/compensator, the present invention requires very little or no additional memory and delay processing, and therefore provides the estimation apparatus and method with convenience.