In this letter, the characteristic basis functions (CBFs) are utilized to enhance the compressive sensing (CS) technique to analyze the bistatic scattering problems of three‐dimensional targets. The CS technique can efficiently analyze the bistatic scattering problems by establishing an underdetermined linear equation instead of traditional full‐rank dense impedance matrix equation. However, the CS method is limited to two‐dimensional targets. The reason is that the induced currents of the three‐dimensional target expressed by Rao‐Wilton‐Glisson basis functions are not sparse on the commonly sparse basis, since the field source has no orderly distribution when the target is modeled and discretized by commercial software. In order to solve this problem, the CBFs are used in this letter as the sparse basis to improve the sparsity of the induced currents. The numerical results of different targets are presented to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.