AbstractImage based sensing in wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) is mainly depend on the capability of the deployed scheme to ensure low-power consumption. In depth, the approach of periodic image transmission to the end user, even after compression, will shortly exhaust the energy of the sensors and dramatically reduces the network life time. Thus, detecting an event of interest and extracting the useful information's to decide at source node will avoid flooding the network with unusable data and contributes to extend the whole network life-time. The efficiency of this approach for image-based sensing, in severely resource-constrained sensors, heavily depends on the complexity of the designed sensing scheme.The main contribution of this paper is to present a low-complexity scheme using Zernike Moment to detect a new object and to recognize the appearance of a specific target before sending a notification to the end user. The paper presents the specification of the proposed scheme and its implementation on wireless multimedia sensors. It addresses the performance's evaluation in terms of time and energy consumption. The results show the high accuracy of the proposed approach to efficiently recognize the target and notify the end user with interesting performance that overcomes the efficiency of other similar sensing approaches proposed in the literature.