Purpose This study aims to promote the anti-disturbance and tracking accuracy of optoelectronic stabilized platforms, which ensure that optical detectors accurately track targets and acquire high-quality images. Design/methodology/approach An improved active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) strategy based on model-assisted double extended state observers (MDESOs) is proposed in this paper. First, by establishing an auxiliary model, the total disturbances are separated into two parts: inner and external disturbances. Then, MDESOs are designed to estimate the two parts by separately using two parallel ESOs, by which the controlled plant is adjusted to the ideal pure integral series. Simultaneously, combined with the nonlinear state error feedback, an overall control strategy is established. Findings Compared with the conventional ADRC and proportional derivative, the improved ADRC (IADRC) has stronger robustness and adaptability and effectively reduces the requirements for model accuracy and the gain of the ESO. The error of the auxiliary model is tolerated to exceed 50%, and the parameter values of the MDESOs are reduced by 90%. Originality/value The total disturbance rejection rate of the proposed strategy is only 3.11% under multiple disturbances, which indicates that the IADRC strategy significantly promotes anti-disturbance performance.