The invention discloses an attitude determination method based on compressed sensing imaging and a star sensor. The method comprises the steps of performing the compressed sensing imaging on starry sky to acquire an observation star map after the compressed sensing imaging, processing acquired data after the compressed sensing imaging, extracting a star point centroid position in the observation star map after the compressed sensing imaging, calculating a feature of the star point centroid position, matching the feature with a navigation feature database for recognition, and determining the current triaxial orientation of the star sensor.According to a control method of the star sensor based on the compressed sensing imaging and the star sensor, the traditional optical imaging is developed into the compressed sensing imaging based on a compressed sensing theory; the compressed imaging data is processed to achieve attitude determination at a low sampling rate; two-dimensional imaging is not required; high-precision attitude output can be kept by a smaller data size; and compared with the traditional optical imaging, the high cost of the large-field-of-view high precision star sensor in data acquisition, storage and processing is lowered.