Shadow detection and suppression were key steps in video processing system. The accuracy of subsequent analysis, such as target tracking and object recognition, will be directly affected by this step. The paradox of the shadow detection was that it was difficult to solve false shadow detection and shadow missing problems simultaneously. This paper proposed an improved method to detect shadows. The method use Gabor filters to optimize traditional statistical method. The advantage of this method is considering brightness, color and texture features together. Experiments show that the good results obtained.