This paper presents a low complex, energy efficient image compression algorithm explicitly designed for resource constrained wireless camera sensor network. This compression scheme applies Half Zonal Binary DCT which extracts only half of the samples and codes them using Golomb Rice Code. The proposed method overcomes the computation and energy limitation of individual nodes and is investigated in terms of image quality, entropy, computation energy and overall energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm consumes only around 14% of energy needed by Independent JPEG Group and hence increases the life time of WSN considerably. © 2012 IEEE.