Image acquisition and communication in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are key issues for some applications that require image sensing. Lowering the sampling rate and reducing the amount of data to be transmitted can greatly save hardware costs and power consumption to overcome communication bottlenecks. To serve this purpose, block compressed sampling (CS) can be used. For block CS, the sparsity of the signal to be sampled is an important parameter. On the sampling side of sensor nodes, we cannot obtain the complete digital signal. Therefore, it is challenging to perform adaptive rate sampling for block CS. In this article, a novel rate adaptive allocation block CS scheme based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is proposed. First, we calculate an energy matrix of measurement results (EMMR) and perform EMD on EMMR. Considering the high computational complexity of 2-D EMD, which will increase the burden on the sampling side, we propose a 1-D EMD based on zigzag scanning to decompose EMMR. Then, we can obtain an energy distribution map (EDM) of high-frequency components of EMMR. Finally, the adaptive allocation of sampling rate is carried out according to the EDM of high-frequency components. On the reconstruction side of WSN, we propose a reconstruction algorithm based on residual measurement results, which can further improve the reconstruction accuracy of images. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme has improved the accuracy in general compared with the previous schemes, and the subjective quality of the reconstructed images is also improved.