In this paper,a method was established for the quantitative detection of petroleum substances using mobile phone as detector.D values for Euclidean distance based on RGB and blank value calculation were applied to colorimetry to improve the precision of the method.Influences of different smart phones on the detection results under high illuminance were investigated.Results showed that the detection effects were significantly improved with the increase of aperture value(F).Influences of white balance mode and light source on the standard curve of D values were investigated to obtain the suitable conditions for warm color system detection,namely a 2 800 K white balance mode and a 300 W iodine tungsten lamp as light source.Under the above conditions,this method was applied in the detection of standard sample with a correlation coefficient larger than 0.99 and a testing range similar to that of spectrophotometry.The relative error for standard sample was 2.13% and the relative standard deviation was 3.0%,and the recoveries for standard addition ranged from 92.0% to 105%.This proposed method is accurate,convenient,low cost and easy to maintain,and it is suitable for real time online detection of remote automation.