Image segmentation is a necessary step in image analysis. Support vector machine (SVM) approach is proposed to segment images and its segmentation performance is evaluated.Experimental results show that: the effects of kernel function and model parameters on the segmentation performance are significant; SVM approach is less sensitive to noise in image segmentation; The segmentation performance of SVM approach is better than that of back-propagation multi-layer perceptron (BP-MLP) approach and fuzzy c-means (FCM) approach.