An efficient method for implementing image reconstruction algorithms for Compton cameras is presented. Since Compton scattering formula establishes a cone surface from which the incident photon must have originated, it is crucial to implement a computationally efficient cone-surface integration method for image reconstruction. In this paper we assume that a cone is made up of a series of ellipses (or circles) stacked up one on top of the other. In order to reduce computational burden for tracing ellipses formed by the intersection of a cone and an image plane, we propose a new method using a series of imaginary planes perpendicular to the cone axis so that each plane contains a circle, not an ellipse. In this case the cone surface integral can be performed by simply accumulating the circles along the cone axis. To reduce the computational cost of tracing circles, only one of the circles in the cone is traced and the rest are determined by using simple trigonometric ratios. For our experiments, we used the three different schemes for tracing ellipses; (i) using the samples generated by the ellipse equation, (ii) using the fixed number of samples along a circle on the imaginary plane, and (iii) using the fixed sampling interval along a circle on the imaginary plane. We then compared performance of the above three methods by applying them to the two reconstruction algorithms - the simple back-projection method and the expectation-maximization algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods (ii) and (iii) using imaginary planes significantly improve reconstruction accuracy as well as computational efficiency.