The invention discloses an image segmentation method based on improved whale optimal fuzzy clustering, so as to mainly solve the problems of serious loss and long segmentation time after image information segmentation in the prior art. The method comprises the realization steps: 1, an image is inputted and the gray levels of all pixel points are acquired; 2, c clustering centers are selected to segment the image into c classes; 3, n whales are generated, wherein each whale has a c-dimensional vector, which represents a possible solution of a set of clustering centers; 4, with the reciprocal ofa fast fuzzy C-means clustering objective function as a fitness value, the optimal clustering center is searched; and 5, according to the searched set of clustering centers corresponding to the maximum fitness value, image segmentation is realized, pixel points with the gray levels in the same membership grade interval are classified as one class, and an image after segmentation is outputted. Through combining the optimization result and the fuzzy clustering image segmentation, the image segmentation effects are improved, and the method can be used for target detection, video monitoring and medical imaging.