A novel method that hybridizes genetic algorithm (GA) and expectation maximization (EM) algorithm for the classification of syn-thetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is proposed by the finite Gaussian mixtures model (GMM) and multiscale autoregressive (MAR)model. This algorithm is capable of improving the global optimality and consistency of the classification performance. The experiments on the SAR images show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the standard EM method significantly in classification accuracy.