Abstract: Based on the technology of FPGA,a real-time object classification method in color image is presented.In order to calibrate the object color in different lighting conditions,a kind of statistic ellipsoidal model is used.In this method,a 3-D Color Look-up Table(CLUT) is built in which only 18 bits are applied to represent one kind of color,instead of conventional 24 bits.So this method resolves the problem of object overlapping in color space,and has the merits of higher classification accuracy and lower memory cost than traditional ones.Moreover,this method is implemented on FPGA,which can highly reduce the CPU computation burden and remarkably improve the performance of the vision system.This method is validated by the applications on mobile robot and industrial vision system.