Image compression had been extensively studied for reducing coding rate yet producing acceptable visual quality. However, there are many application scenarios where the compressed images are used for automatic recognition rather than human viewing, thus the visual quality is no longer critical for compression. SIFT features have demonstrated their utility in many recognition scenarios and SIFT-preserving compression is developed recently. In this paper, we firstly study the SIFT-preserving compression of license plate images for recognition accuracy rather than visual quality. According to extracted SIFT features, each image is divided into SIFT coding-units and non-SIFT coding-units. Each coding-unit is assigned with a different quality parameter when using JPEG for compression. We compare our proposed scheme with the standard JPEG that uses a unified quality parameter. Experimental results with manually tuned parameters show that on average 14% bit-rate can be saved by our scheme, without any loss of recognition accuracy.