It all depends upon various criteria. There are various strategies to improve the performance of the canvas.
I consider that even though you draw those images yourself, you will have to buffer it to get the performance gain... I would suggest you to use the images.
Still it all depends upon the problem context. Please read the following article, it will give you a fair idea on improving canvas performance.
Reference: http://www.technobits.net/articles/13730/improving-html5-canvas-performance/http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/canvas/performance/