Restricted computational power, memory limitations, narrow bandwidth and energy supplied present strong limits in sensor nodes are the important points should be considered during the real time transmission of data using wireless sensor networks. Therefore, maximizing network lifetime and minimizing energy consumption are always optimization goals. To reduce the energy consumption of the sensor network during image transmission, an energy efficient image compression scheme is proposed. The image compression scheme reduces the required memory. To address the above mentioned concerns, in this paper, an approach of image transmission in WSNs, taking advantage of JPEG2000 still image compression standard and using MATLAB and C from Jasper. The features provided by JPEG2000 were achieved using techniques such as Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Embedded Block Coding with Optimized Truncation (EBCOT).Image quality and energy consumption are the two performance parameters should be considered during the image compression and transmission. Simulation results are presented and show that the proposed scheme optimizes network lifetime and reduces significantly the amount of required memory by analyzing the functional influence of each parameter of this distributed image compression algorithm. © 2005 - 2013 JATIT & LLS. All rights reserved.