Detection of human beings in a complex background environment is a challenging task in computer vision. Most of the time no single feature algorithm is rich enough to capture all the relevant information available in the image. In this paper, we propose a new feature extraction technique that combines three types of visual information; shape, color, and texture, and is named as the Color space Phase features with Gradient and Texture (CPGT) algorithm. Gradient concept and the phase congruency in color domain are used to localize the shape features. The Center-Symmetric Local Binary Pattern (CSLBP) approach is used to extract the texture information of the image. Fusing of these complementary features yields to capture a broad range of the human appearance details that improves the detection performance. The proposed features are formed by computing the gradient magnitude and CSLBP values for each pixel in the image with respect to its neighborhood in addition to the phase congruency of the three-color channels. Only the maximum phase congruency magnitudes are selected from the corresponding color channels. The histogram of oriented phase and gradients as well as the histogram of CSLBP values for the local regions of the image are determined and concatenated to construct the proposed descriptor. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is performed to reduce the dimensionality of the resultant features. Several experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed descriptor. The experimental results show that the proposed approach yields promising performance and has lower error rates when compared to several state of the art feature extraction methodologies. We observed a miss rate of 2.23% in the INRIA dataset and 2.6% in the NICTA dataset.