Abstract: In this paper, we present a translucent material estimation method based on color histogram matching. Our algorithm could estimate translucent material parameters from a single input image, producing similar translucent appearances in the synthetic image to the input image. The algorithm treats the translucent material estimation for homogeneous material as an energy minimization problem, which was defined as the difference between the color histograms of the input image and the synthetic image. Our method uses conjugate gradient algorithm to minimize energy function and get the translucent material estimation results. Heterogeneous translucent material can also be estimated after material classification. As the results show, our method could produce convincing results under complicated 3D shape and lighting conditions, avoiding the inaccuracy introduced by shape and lighting estimation.