Based on the theory of compressed sensing (CS), the method that the distant target object is illuminated by high power nanosecond pulsed laser and the target object is imaged by the telescope to digital micro-mirror device (DMD) plane is proposed. With the use of the loaded DMD patterns, the image of the target object is modulated (back-modulation), and a photomultiplier tube (PMT) as a single-pixel detector is applied to collect the total light modulated by the patterns, and the reconstruction of three-dimensional (3D) image of the distant target object is completed by the computation of compressed sensing. This system is applied to the imaging of the long-range 3D object. By the built of experimental system, the measurement of the absolute distances of the object at a distance of 230 m and 4.5 km is implemented and the 3D imaging of 64 pixel×64 pixel is realized. It is also demonstrated that for the image recovery of long distance using CS, with the increase of sampling rate, the quality and contrast of the recovered image are improved to some extent. The sparser the image of the object is, the less the number of required samplings for image reconstruction.