The invention relates to a head detection method and belongs to the image processing technical field. The method includes the following steps that: foreground extraction is performed on an inputted video image, each frame of image is zoomed to different sizes; pixel difference characteristics are extracted from each size-fixed image window and transmitted to an Adaboost multi-view classifier so as to be applied to head detection; a head model is adopted to match foreground masks, so that a head prior probability graph can be generated; and the results of the head prior probability graph and the Adaboost multi-view classifier are weighed, so that a final result can be obtained. According to the above head detection method, the pixel difference characteristics and the human head prior model are adopted, so that the real-time performance and accuracy of detection can be greatly improved.