The document images scanned may be skew somehow. Severe image skew makes image segmentation difficult and lowers character recognition accuracy. A new approach of skew detection based on Hough transform was presented. In order to overcome the heavy computing burdens of Hough transform,the method selected the subfield with part representation and extracted the horizontal edge from images in the first place, then performed two-stage Hough transform on the edge extracted. Experiment results show that it corrects the skew document images more rapidly and accurately than general Hough method and cross relation method.