Abstract. The degradation of image quality caused by satellite jitter has drawn attention, and many researches have illustrated the importance of the jitter compensation. As the essential component of jitter compensation, image matching involves in the determination of jitter processing accuracy. Hence, the impact of imaging matching methods on jitter compensation is explored in this paper. At first, a framework based on imaging matching is built for jitter compensation. Two typical sub-pixel accuracy matching methods (i.e. correlation coefficient and least squares matching, as well as phase correlation matching) could then be served for the framework. The experiments are designed by using multispectral images of GF-1 satellite, and quantitative evaluations show that compared with correlation coefficient and least squares matching, phase matching method makes the accuracy of obtained jitter curve increase with the amplitude error decreasing by more than 0.012 pixel as well as phase error decreasing by more than 0.0119 rad, and makes the quality of restored images improved on both geometry and radiation. It indicates that phase matching method has better performance with respect to the framework of jitter compensation in this paper.