Traditionally, the problems of applying orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) to large images are its high computing time and its requirement for a large matrix. In this paper, we propose a fast image recovery algorithm by dividing the image into block of n??n pixels and applying OMP to each n??n block instead of the entire image. The key idea is that small matrix requires less computing time and less memory. In the experiment, the block based OMP was applied to three standard test images: Lena, Mandrill and Pirate. Compared to standard OMP, block based OMP required less computing time while giving comparable PSNR.