In this paper, by using compressed sensing techniques, a new approach to achieve robust high resolution detection in sparse multipath channels is presented. Currently used sparse reconstruction techniques are not immediately applicable in wireless channel modeling and radar signal processing. Here, we make use of the cross-ambiguity function (CAF) and transformed the reconstruction problem from time to delay-Doppler domain for efficient exploitation of the delay-Doppler diversity of the multipath components. Simulation results quantify the performance gain and robustness obtained by this new CAF based compressed sensing approach. ©2010 IEEE.