On the basis of a compressive sensing technique, an encryption scheme is proposed in order to improve security for the image. In the proposed algorithm, Discrete Wavelet Transform is applied to the plain image in order to transform it into many wavelet coefficients and then those coefficients are in turn confused using zigzag confusion. Finally they are converted into a cipher image by applying the proposed compressive sensing technique. Randomly generated 256 bit key is used to calculate the skew tent map, which further forms the basis for creating the measurement matrix used in compressive sensing. Simulation results show good performance for the proposed algorithm over the existing algorithms. © 2006-2018 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN).