In this paper, a new simple control method for active power filter which can realized the complete compensation of the harmonic currents is proposed. In the proposed scheme, a compensating current reference generator employing resonance model implemented by a DSP(Digital Signal Processor) is introduced. Deadbeat control is employed to control the active power filter. The switching pulse width based SVM(Space Vector Modulation) is adopted so that the current of active power filter is been exactly equal to its reference at the next sampling instant. To compensate the computation delay of digital controller, the prediction of current is achieved by the current observer with deadbeat response.