Based on the QuickBird panchromatic image of the loess plateau,the authors designed four geometric rectification modes including polynomial transformation and ortho-rectification by making reference of points measured by GPS in the field and reference of rectified 1∶10 000 topographic maps. The experiment results show that 1 with the even distribution of different numbers of GCPs,the range of residual error of GCPs is much wider than that of the RMS of rectified image in each rectification mode; 2 among the four rectification modes,the GPS point-ortho-rectification mode has the highest accuracy,followed in succession by 1∶10 000 topographic map-ortho-rectification mode, GPS point-polynomial transformation mode and 1∶10 000 topographic map-polynomial transformation mode. The highest accuracy for each mode is 2.33 m, 4.30 m, 6.91 m and 7.42 m respectively; 3 the GCP number is positively correlated with the accuracy of rectified images except for the GPS points- ortho-rectification mode.