Target localization is one of the essential tasks in almost applications of wireless sensor networks. Some traditional compressed sensing (CS)-based target localization methods may achieve low-precision target localization because of using locally optimal sparse solutions. Solving global optimization for the sparse recovery problem remains a challenge in CS-based target localization. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-level jumping algorithm to address this problem, which achieves high-precision target localization by solving the globally optimal sparse solution of l p -norm ( 0 < p < 1 ) minimization. By repeating the process of energy-level jumping, our proposed algorithm establishes a global convergence path from an initial point to the global minimizer. Compared with existing CS-based target localization methods, the simulation results show that our localization algorithm obtain more accurate locations of targets with the significantly reduced number of measurements.