An inertial frame based alignment (IFBA) method is presented, especially for the applications on a rocking platform, e.g., marine applications. Defining the initial body frame as the inertial frame, the IFBA method achieves the alignment by virtue of a cascade of low-pass FIR filters, which attenuate the disturbing acceleration and maintain the gravity vector. The aligning time rests with the orders of the FIR filter group, and the method is suitable for large initial misali gnment case. An alignment scheme comprising a coarse phase by the IFBA method an d a fine phase by a Kalman filter is presented. Both vehicle-based and ship-based alignment experiments were carried out. The results show that the proposed scheme converges much faster than the traditional method at no cost of precision and also works well under any large initial misalignment.