In the imaging process of bistatic inverse synthetic aperture radar (Bi–ISAR), the echo is easily affected by the internal interference and external environment of the radar system, resulting in the problems of sparse aperture and low echo signal noise ratio. The efficiency of conventional sparse aperture imaging methods is greatly reduced. To solve the above problems, a Bi–ISAR sparse aperture imaging algorithm based on Complex Variational Modal Decomposition (CVMD) and wavelet threshold de–noising is proposed. Firstly, the Bi–ISAR sparse aperture echo signal model is established, the sparse basis matching the echo is constructed, the echo signal is decomposed into different intrinsic mode functions (IMF) by CVMD, and the IMFs belonging to the signal are separated by the energy relationship criterion. Then, after the IMFs is de–noising by the improved wavelet threshold de–noising algorithm, the original signal is synthesized, and the signal after de–noising is reconstructed by using the orthogonal matching pursuing algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve Bi–ISAR sparse aperture high−resolution imaging under low signal noise ratio and has fine anti−noise performance.