Abstract. A method of human skin region detection based on PCNN is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the input origin image is translated from RGB color space to YIQ color space, and I channel image is obtained. Secondly, we use the synchronous pulse firing mechanism of pulse coupled neural network (PCNN) to simulate the skin region detection mechanism of human eyes. Skin and non-skin regions are fired in different time. Therefore, skin regions are detected. Our comparison with other methods shows that the proposed method produces more accurate segmentation results.