In combination of the characteristic of the network architecture of wireless multimedia sensor networks （WMSNs）, a distributed multi-node cooperative network （DMCN） model is designed by using the concept of in-network processing to improve their energy, memory and computational power. To balance the energy consumption of the network, according to roles division, camera nodes and common nodes are cooperated to accomplish the workload of image acquisition, compression and transmission. Camera nodes gather images and send blocking images to the common nodes in cluster. Common nodes adaptively compress the partitioned images by using a noise-tolerant distributed image compression （NDIC） algorithm based on principal component analysis （PCA） called NDIC-PCA algorithm and send the compressed data to the cluster head node. Then, the cluster head node sends the compressed image data to the station. Simulation results demonstrate that, DCNM can effectively balance the energy consumption of network and largely extend the network lifecycle. In addition, compared with previous algorithms, the proposed NDIC-PCA algorithm achieves higher peak signal to noise ratio without decreasing compression ratio.
