In order to improve the imaging efficiency and real-time performance of three-dimensional (3D) imaging lidar based on range gating technique, a method to obtain the 3D and intensity information by retrieving the single CCD exposure image is proposed, which is applied to the range gating imaging lidar system. In the proposed method, the echo signal is encoded by sparse sampling matrix, correlation algorithm is used to decode the distance, and the compressed sensing technique is applied to recover the information. The proposed method is investigated by simulation and laboratory imaging experiments, and results show that it can effectively reduce the data amount and improve the system imaging efficiency.