Abstract: The canopy height model (CHM) was built based on the visible light image of UAV in the artificial forest area, which was used as the basic data for extracting individual tree crowns, so as to avoid the impacts on the extraction of the individual tree crown, such as the impacts of crown shadow, uneven light, the similar color of tree crown and grass in the digital orthophoto map (DOM) of UAV. Subsequently, individual tree crowns were extracted from CHM, using marker controlled watershed algorithm. First of all, the Otsu algorithm was used to separate the crown and non-crown in CHM, and a morphological image thinning algorithm was used to tackle the problem of adhesion between some crowns and obtain a rough individual tree crown. Then, the distance transformation and H-Maxima algorithm were combined to obtain the individual tree position marker, and the distance transformation and watershed algorithm were combined to obtain as the background marker the rough influence area boundary of each individual tree crown. Furthermore, to enhance the crown edge pixels in CHM, the Sobel algorithm was employed to obtain its gradient image, the minimum value forcing algorithm was used to set the individual tree position marker as the starting point of watershed algorithm segmentation, and the background marker was used to constrain the segmentation process. Finally, the watershed algorithm was applied to segment the marked gradient image and obtain the individual tree crown. And the correct individual tree crown in the study area was obtained by manual visual interpretation, which was used as validation data. Through the accuracy verification, the overall accuracy of the extracted individual tree position was found to be 92.79%, and the extracted individual tree crown F-score value was 84.62%, with relatively high extraction accuracy. Three groups of comparative experiments were carried out so as to obtain three individual tree crown extraction results: by means of no removal of crown adhesion, the local maximum algorithm replacing the H-Maxima algorithm used in this research, and no background marker. Through accuracy verification, F-score values were 72.33%, 10.16%, and 77.89% respectively, which were 12.29%, 74.46%, and 6.73% lower than those obtained by using the method in this research. The comparison of methods and generality test were also carried out, and the experimental results show that the individual tree crown in the artificial forest area can be effectively obtained by using the marker-controlled watershed algorithm with CHM as the research data.