Abstract:One-dimensional minimum error thresholding method assumes that the histogram distributions of object and background are governed by a mixture Gaussian distribution. Considering the affects of noise and other factors on image quality, based on the assumption of two-dimensional mixture Gaussian distribution, a two-dimensional linear-type minimum error threshold segmentation method is proposed on two-dimensional gray-level histogram. In order to improve the running speed, a fast recursive formula is also given. Experimental results show that the new method is a valuable image segmentation method which can be well adapted to the cases where the variances of the object and the background are distinctly different and contains noises.