Aiming at solving the problem in image segmentation when the image has high color similarity in the boundaries between foreground and background,a novel video segmentation algorithm based on long-edge detection is proposed.First the energy function is constructed with the color term and contrast term.Then a novel edge detection method based on edge length is applied to the result of color model in the basic model,and the color term and contrast term in the energy function are improved with the result of long edge detection.Finally the energy function is minimized by using the graph cutting method and the foreground extraction results are got.Experiments demonstrate that compared with other methods,our algorithm has obvious advantages in the case of high similarity in the boundaries between foreground and background.