Image reconstruction based on sparse constraints is an important research topic in compressed sensing. Sparsity adaptive matching pursuit (SAMP) is a greedy pursuit reconstruction algorithm, which reconstructs signals without prior information of the sparsity level and potentially presents better reconstruction performance than other greedy pursuit algorithms. However, SAMP still suffers from being sensitive to the step size selection at high sub-sampling ratios. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a constrained backtracking matching pursuit (CBMP) algorithm for image reconstruction. The composite strategy, including two kinds of constraints, effectively controls the increment of the estimated sparsity level at different stages and accurately estimates the true support set of images. Based on the relationship analysis between the signal and measurement, an energy criterion is also proposed as a constraint. At the same time, the four-to-one rule is improved as an extra constraint. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CBMP yields better performance and further stability than other greedy pursuit algorithms for image reconstruction.