The accuracy and stability of the photoelectric stabilized platform will be inevitably affected by the friction disturbance and the base platform disturbance in the actual operation. To improve the disturbance rejection performance, two kinds of the disturbance observers are employed and compared in this paper, including the adaptive proportion-integrator observer and the robust sliding mode observer. The disturbances of the friction torque and the moving base are observed, then these observed values are compensated to the voltage loop by the feedback and feedforward, respectively. While the disturbances of the friction torque and the shaking base are compensated, the parameters of the speed stability loop are also tuned to improve the performance of this photoelectric stabilized platform. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by both simulations and experiments. The results show that the proposed disturbance compensation control method based on the sliding mode observer has strong robustness and can effectively reduce the impact of system disturbances. © 2024