A new data compression tech-nique, called the threshold discrete Fourier trans-form (TDFT) method, is proposed to efficiently com-press the scattered field data from complex targets.Compared with the matrix pencil (MP) method andCLEAN method, it is quite simple and time saving un-der the similar compression ratio and reconstructionerror. In TDFT and CLEAN methods, the optimizedsegmentation is found which results in high compres-sion ratio.