The infrared tracking accuracy of shipboard photoelectric tracking device may be greatly affected in the capture stage by the bow wave, pitch and roll disturbance. In order to improve the tracking accuracy, the paper presents a speed loop feedforward control strategy, which can be divided into three steps. First, transform the geodetic coordinate system into the coordinate system of deck. Secondly, use CA model least square method to filter the speed when the target appears in the image field of view and satisfies the extraction threshold value. And finally, feed the filtered speed forward to the speed loop. Series correction is used in the servo control loop, and different regulators are selected according to the tracking status. A complete double-loop circuit is formed combined with infrared miss distance information. Experiment to infrared tracking performance of an shipboard photoelectric device showed that: the maximum tracking error is respectively 120″ and 78″ before and after using the feed-forward compensation. Thus the algorithm can reduce the tracking error and improve shipboard optoelectronic countermeasure ability.