To ensure the quality and safety of pure milk,detection method of typical preservative-potassium sorbate in milk was researched in this paper.Hyperspectral imaging technology was applied to realize rapid detection.Influence factors for hyperspectral data collection for milk samples were firstly researched,including height of sample,bottom color and sample filled up container or not.Pretreatment methods and variable selection algorithms were applied into original spectral data.Rapid detection models were built based on support vector machine method(SVM).Finally,standard normalized variable(SNV)—competitive adaptive reweighted sampling(CARS)and SVM model was chosen in this paper.The accuracies of calibration set and testing set were 0.97 and 0.97,respectively.Kappa coefficient of the model was 0.93.It could be seen that hyperspectral imaging technology could be used to detect for potassium sorbate in milk.Meanwhile,it also provided methodological supports for the rapid detection of other preservatives in milk.