The image thresholding techniques are considered as a must for objects segmentation, compression and target recognition, and they have been widely studied for the last few decades; for example, the multilevel thresholding methods, and as such ( they) render more great challenges for image segmentation techniques that remain computationally more expensive, when their choices of threshold numbers were increased. Therefore, our aim was to propose an algorithm based on Bayesian theorem and the so-called honeybee- mating algorithm (HBMA), called a Bayesian honey bee mating algorithm BHBMA. It can notonly reduce the computational time and curse of dimensionality, but also can run more reliably and more stably. This enhanced capability was technically accomplished by embedding a new population initialization strategy based on the characteristics of multi-level thresholding technique in pixel-basedintensity images arranged from lower grey levels to higher ones. Extensive experiments have shown that our proposed method outperformed other state-of-the-art algorithms empirically in terms of their effectiveness and efficiency, when applying to complex image processing scenario such as automatic target recognition. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.