The compressed sensing theory, which has received great attention in the field of radar technology, can effectively reduce the data rate of high‐resolution radar imaging systems and solve the problem of collecting, storing, and transmitting large amounts of data in radar systems. Through the study of radar signal processing theory, it can be found that the echo of radar LFM transmit signal has sparse characteristics in the distance upward; based on this, we can consider using the theory of compressed sensing in the processing of radar echo to optimize the processing. In this paper, a fast iterative shrinkage‐thresholding reconstruction algorithm based on protection coefficients is proposed. Under the new scheme, firstly, the LFM echo signal’s good sparse representation is obtained by using the time‐frequency sparse characteristics of the LFM echo signal under the fractional Fourier transform; all reconstruction coefficients are analyzed in the iterative process. Then, the coefficients related to the feature will be protected from threshold shrinkage to reduce information loss. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through simulation experiments and application example analysis. The experimental results show that the reconstruction error of this method is lower and the reconstruction effect is better compared with the existing reconstruction algorithms.