Colour identification is a common task for many applications in computer vision. Many existing colour identification methods are application dependent. Therefore, they could only operate in certain environments and their performances are highly dependent on the lighting condition and quality of the images. In this paper, a novel colour identification method is introduced using an adaptive hue based colour model. The proposed method firstly analyses the image by collecting a variety of information from the given image. It is then followed by a colour space selection scheme in which the most suitable hue based colour space is selected based on properties obtained through image analysis. Finally, the image is filtered through the channels of the selected colour model to identify the target colour. Tests on various images from different datasets have shown that this method is capable of extracting the required colour effectively from images with varying qualities.