Most feature extraction algorithms are highly sensitive to illumination variations. This paper presents a parameter adaptive illumination robust extraction transform (PA-IRFET) which is 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 illumination-space. 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. PA-IRFET improves the number of detected features of IRFET greatly and improves the repeated features of IRFET by around 20% on average. This demonstrates that PA-IRFET is more robust to illumination variation than IRFET.