An image similarity algorithm based on Lance Williams distance was proposed to solve the problem that the boundary of similarity between dust image and dust-free image is not obvious when illumination changes in desktop dust detection. The Lance Williams distance between template image and the images with or without dust was converted to the similarity value of (0, 1] and the difference of similarity values was expanded with exponential function properties in the algorithm. In order to enhance the dust texture feature information, the gray image was convolved with the Laplacian and then the feature parameters were obtained using co-occurrence matrix feature extraction algorithm and combined into a one-dimensional vector. The similarity of feature parameter vectors between template image and to-be-detected image was calculated by the improved similarity algorithm to determine whether the desktop has dust or not. Experimental results show that the similarity is more than 90.01% between dust-free images and less than 62.57% between dust and dust-free images in the range of 300~900 lux illumination. The average of the two similarities can be regarded as the threshold to determine whether the desktop has dust or not when illumination changes.