A portable human skin detector based on active infrared illumination is proposed in this paper. The system aims at detecting human skin in realtime based on two infrared bands under various background illumination conditions. Safe, realtime and robust detection is realized by combining the active pulse illumination of two low power LEDs, i.e. 1070nm and 1550nm, with high frequency and the phase sensitive detection based on lock-in amplifier. The robustness of the detection under daylight, in a dark room and in the smog is confirmed by the experimental results.