As most feature extraction algorithms are highly sensitive to illumination variations,this paper presents a Parameter Adaptive Illumination Robust Extraction Transform (PA-IRFET) based on the histogram of the image. The method includes three steps. Firstly, the gray transformation function and parameters are determined based on the analysis of the histogram of the image. Then, the function is used to transform the image to build an illumination-space of the image. Finally, the illumination-space is combined with feature extraction algorithms to detect illumination robust features. In the experiment of this paper, PA-IRFET is combined with Harris detector to improve the number of detected features of IRFET greatly and the number of repeated features of IRFET has been improved by about 20% on average. This demonstrates that the PA-IRFET is more robust to illumination variations than the IRFET.