Changing illumination condition can change the result of image segmentation algorithm and reduce the intelligent recognition rate. A novel color image segmentation method robust to illumination variations is presented. The method is applied to the skin segmentation. Based on the hue preserving algorithm, the method reduces the dimensionality of the red-green-blue (RGB) space to one dimension, while keeping the hue of every pixel unchanging before and after space transformation. In the new color space, the skin color model is established using Gaussian model. Experimental results show that the method is robust to illumination variations, and has low computational complexity.