Abstract: CDOM concentration is an important parameter of water environment.In order to accurately retrieve CDOM concentration in lakes,a field experiment including water quality analysis and spectrum measurements was carried out on 74 stations of Lake Taihu during 14 days from Nov.8,2007 to Nov.21,2007.Based on the analysis of water inherent optical properties,sensitive wavebands were selected and neutral network models of CDOM concentration retrieval were established.The results show that a model with 10 nerve cells in hidden layer performs best,whose R is 0.887 and RMSE is 0.156.Meanwhile,the predicative errors of neutral network model and previous algorithm models were analyzed through validation samples.Average relative error of the former is(12.8±29.9)%,while others are very large,which indicates that neutral network model is more suitable for CDOM concentration retrieval in Lakes than other algorithm models.