Skin color is a useful means for human face detection. In this paper, we propose an efficient color compensation method for skin color segmentation under varying lighting conditions. One of the major problems of using skin color is that a face region may not be detected under poor or uneven lighting conditions. Our approach considers the distributionof the color components of skin pixels and the color response of capturing machines under different illuminations. Experimental results show that this algorithm can improve the performance of face segmentationunder poor or strong lightingconditions.