Formaldehyde is a carcinogenic and teratogenic toxic gas. With the extensive use of a variety of building materials, indoor formaldehyde has seriously threatened human health and environment. The catalytic oxidation is considered the most promising method for the removal of formaldehyde from air. In this work, we report a Pt/TiO2 catalyst with Ce modification, and investigate its activity of catalytic oxidation of low concentration formaldehyde at room temperature. The experimental results show that the trace formaldehyde (20mg/m(3)) could be completely degraded at 55min by using Pt-Ce/TiO2 catalyst. In view of multiple characterizations, such as BET, XRD, TEM, STEM, XPS and CO adsorption, it is indicated that the modification of Ce can effectively improve the dispersion of Pt particles in the surface and reduction of Pt particle size from 2.9 to 2.2nm. Moreover, XPS results show that the Ce in the catalyst could enhance the binding energies of Pt, provide abundant oxygen vacancies, and could increase the ratio of adsorbed oxygen atoms to lattice oxygen atoms, which is conducive to the adsorption of oxygen, leading to the improvement of catalytic activity. [GRAPHICS] .