A fast target motion compensation method for airborne platform is proposed to solve the problem that the target position changes greatly and can’t be accurately located in the image under the condition of large maneuvering motion of the carrier. Firstly, the local area image of the target location in the previous frame is selected as the template image. Secondly, according to the position of the target in the previous frame, the detector installation angle and the aircraft attitude information, the position of the target in the current frame is predicted, and the local area image of the predicted target location as the image to be registered is obtained. Finally SIFT algorithm is applied to calculate the key points in the template image and the registered image, and accurate target position in the current frame is obtained through image registration, which ensures the accuracy of target location calculation in the image sequences. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately locate the position of the target in continuous frame under the condition of large maneuver flight, compared with calculating the target position through the whole image registration, the calculation efficiency is greatly improved.