Abstract: In order to obtain a group of satisfying thresholds in image segmentation quickly and accurately,this paper proposed a method based on shuffled frog leaping (SFL) algorithm and Otsu method for multilevel thresholding image segmentation.The method regarded the group of thresholds as a group of potential solutions to a certain objective function,and employed the extended Otsu method to be the fitness function for SFL algorithm.And then,the powerful searching ability of SFL algorithm was used to locate the thresholds in parallel,which combines the global search in the whole swarm and local searches in subswarms.Experimental results showed that compared with the method based on artificial fish swarm (AFS) algorithm,the suggested method obviously improved the performance of image segmentation in speed and quality.