ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / In this paper, we propose a new, low complexity approach for the design of laser radar (LIDAR) systems for use in applications in which the system is wirelessly transmitting its data from a remote location back to a command center for reconstruction and viewing. Specifically, the proposed system collects random samples in different portions of the scene, and the density of sampling is controlled by the local scene complexity. The range samples are transmitted as they are acquired through a wireless communications link to a command center and a constrained absolute-error optimization procedure of the type commonly used for compressive sensing/sampling is applied. The key difficulty in the proposed approach is estimating the local scene complexity without densely sampling the scene and thus increasing the complexity of the LIDAR front end. We show here using simulated data that the complexity of the scene can be accurately estimated from the return pulse shape using a finite moments approach. Furthermore, we find that such complexity estimates correspond strongly to the surface reconstruction error that is achieved using the constrained optimization algorithm with a given number of samples.