Photometric study of the short-period eclipsing binary V441 Lac

•We present the first multi-color VRI CCD light curves of a eclipsing binary V441 Lac.•We obtained photometric parameters of V441 Lac with the Wilson & Devinney program.•We found that the orbital period of V441 Lac exhibits an increasing trend.

We present the first multi-color VRI CCD light curves of a short-period eclipsing binary star v441 Lac in this paper. We obtained our light curves on Oct. 4 and 8, 2013 at Xinglong station of National Astronomical Observatories, China. We updated the ephemeris of V441 Lac based on three new minima derived by our new observational data together with previously available light curve minima. By fitting the O−C (observed minus calculated) values of the minima, we found that the orbital period of V441 Lac exhibits an increasing trend of Ṗ=5.67(0.35)×10-7 days/year, which might be explained by mass transfer from the secondary component to the primary one, or angular momentum exchange by magnetic activities. We also obtained the photometric orbital parameters with the Wilson & Devinney program. Our final result shows that the V441 Lac system is a semi-detached binary with the secondary component filling roche lobe.