Abstract. Reasonable sparse representation of signals are one of the key factors to ensure the quality of compressed sampling, so a proper sparse representing methods should be selected to make the signals sparse to the greatest extent in the applications of compressed sensing. In this paper we adopted the framework of block compressed sensing to sample the images, used the iterative hard thresholding(IHT) algorithm to reconstruct the original images, and employed the wavelet-based contourlet transform, an improved contourlet transform, to decompose 2D images in IHT reconstruction process. Numerical experiments indicated that the runtime of the reconstruction algorithm adopting waveletbased contourlet transform is the shortest compared to that adopting contourlet transform and that adopting wavelet transform; under low compression ratios, the quality of the reconstructed images using wavelet-based contourlet transform is superior to that using contourlet transform and that using traditional wavelet transform.