To overcome illumination changes and pose variations, a pose-invariant face detection method is presented. First, an illumination compensation method based on reference white is presented to overcome the lighting variations. The reference white is obtained according to the component Y from YCbCr color space. Then, a mixture face model is constructed by the Cb and Cr from YCbCr color space and H from the HSV color space to extract faces from colorful image. At last, an eyes model is designed to locate eyes in the obtained face images, which can distinguish face from neck and arms ultimately. The presented method is conducted on the CASIA face database. The experimental results have shown that our method is robust to pose changes and illumination variations, and it can achieve well performance.