Wireless Sensors are used in many real life applications including traffic monitoring to capture the video, converting the video into frames of images and to transmit them to the sink node for analysis. In such a scenario, security is an important issue to be tackled in wireless image transmission due to the presence of attackers in the wireless channel. Here, most of the attackers try to read the information transferred in the network passively in order to misuse the information for personal gains. In order to provide a solution to this problem, a new Elliptic Curve based key selection and Hill Cipher based encryption scheme is proposed in which the keys are permuted to enhance the size of the key to suite the size of the image matrix leading to a secured transmission by effective encryption of the images that are transmitted through wireless sensor networks. Finally, a secured transmission framework using clusters is proposed to make the proposed secure routing algorithm called Elliptic curve Hill cipher and Cluster based Encrypted Routing Algorithm to be more effective with respective increase in security reduction in delay and increase in packet delivery ratio. The proposed algorithm and the architectural framework developed in this work has been tested through experiments and proved that the proposed secure routing algorithm is more efficient when it is used in wireless applications that suite the framework proposed in this work. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.