Skin color detection refers to the process of selecting pixels corresponding to human skin in the image. With the popularity of video image acquisition equipment, the research of color region segmentation in images has become more and more active in recent years. In this paper, a skin color detection algorithm for color images with complex background is proposed. This paper mainly studies how to use skin color model to detect human body parts from complex background. The first step is to select YcbCr color space as the color space of this paper. The second step is to select the elliptical model based on color plane. This paper finally decides to use the fixed threshold elliptic model based on color plane to detect skin color.