Abstract: An effective object segmentation method is proposed which combines Chan-Vese model with saliency map.It firstly uses spectral residual method to extract the saliency region, then gets the general contours of the object using the improved adaptive threshold segmentation to aim at the shortcoming of the threshold segmentation.It makes this contours as the initial curves of Chan-Vese model.This method ensures the active contours evolve close to the object and removes the obstruction from the complex background.It solves the problem that accurate edge can't be obtained while the background of the image is complex;at the same time, it greatly reduces the number of iterations of the CV model.The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is better than the CV method on precision and efficiency both for the complex gray image and medical color image.