Abstract: According to multimedia information collection requirements and characteristics of confined band space in coal mine tunnel and limited energy of sensor nodes, a wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) system model of coal mine was built, and an energy balancing routing method for coal mine WMSN was proposed, which included a position and residual energy based hierarchy clustering in virtual grids (PREHCVG) algorithm and an energy and distance based ant colony routing (EDACR) algorithm. In the method, PREHCVG algorithm divides nodes into different virtual grid for cluster management based on communication radius of the nodes in the network, and selects cluster head nodes according to residual energy and location information of the nodes. EDACR algorithm selects routing nodes from cluster head nodes and alternative cluster head nodes according to residual energy and distance information of the nodes. The simulation results show that the energy balancing routing method for coal mine WMSN can effectively balance energy consumption of WMSN nodes, reduce the number of energy-exhausted nodes and prolong life cycle of WMSN compared to traditional LEACH algorithm.