The invention provides a fingertip detection method in a complex environment. The fingertip detection method comprises the steps of: step 1, calculating dense light stream information corresponding to scene information, and reconstructing a skin color filter to obtain a hand region; step 2, and constructing models of the hand region in various gestures by adopting equal-area blocks, calculating a mass center of the hand region, calculating distances from all contour sampling points to the mass center and an average mass center distance, determining an extended mass center distance according to detected number of fingertips, drawing a circle by taking the mass center as a circle center and the extended mass center distance as the radius, removing contour points inside the circle and a wrist region with maximum number of continuous pixels on the circle, searching contour points with partial maximum mass center distance outside the circle, and marking the contour points as fingertips, and comparing the detected number of fingertips in this round with the detected number of fingertips in the last round to judge whether to continue the fingertip detection. The fingertip detection method is high in robustness, and can detect the fingertips correctly when the hand of a person moves in front of a camera freely in the complex environment, thereby increasing the accuracy and effectiveness of fingertip detection.