Label propagation is a widely used community detection method with low complexity. It assigns an initial label for each node in the network, and then propagates the labels to discover the potential community structure in complex networks. However traditional label propagation is faced with some inadequacies, such as ignoring the difference between nodes and input parameters demanding. To overcome those defects, this paper puts forward an overlapping community detection algorithm based on the improved multi-label propagation. It uses K-shell decomposition method to identify core nodes of the network firstly, and then updates labels outward layer by layer. The number of labels of overlapping nodes is determined by the types of neighbor node when choosing label for a node. Experiment results show that this algorithm makes the community detection results more accurate and stable.