The invention provides a channel estimation method and device. Singular value decomposition is performed on an original observation matrix, according to a result of the singular value decomposition, a reconstructed observation matrix is obtained, sparsity is estimated, the sparsity is the number of nonzero elements in a union of a preset channel impulse response value and an index set omega, wherein omega is generated according to the reconstructed observation matrix and a preset residual vector, and finally, channel estimation is performed using the sparsity. Since the singular value decomposition has the characteristic of relatively strong noise robustness, the method and the device provided by the invention have relatively strong noise robustness, in addition, the method and the device can perform estimation of sparsity without the need to know the sparsity, and thus have relatively high practicability, and the channel estimation method and the device provided by the embodiment have relatively high performance.