The effective method of the recognition of underwater complex objects in sonar image is to segment sonar image into target, shadow and sea-bottom reverberation regions and then extract the edge of the object. Because of the time-varying and space-varying characters of underwater acoustics environment, the sonar images have poor quality and serious speckle noise, so traditional image segmentation is unable to achieve precise segmentation. In the paper, the image segmentation process based on MRF (Markov random field) model is studied, and a practical method of estimating model parameters is proposed. Through analyzing the impact of chosen model parameters, a sonar imagery segmentation algorithm based on fixed parameters’ MRF model is proposed. Both of the segmentation effect and the low computing load are gained. By applying the algorithm to the synthesized texture image and actual side-scan sonar image, the algorithm can be achieved with precise segmentation result. The effective method of the recognition of underwater complex objects in sonar image is to segment sonar image into target, shadow and sea-bottom reverberation regions and then extract the edge of the object. Because of the time-varying and space-varying characters of underwater acoustics environment, the sonar images have poor quality and serious speckle noise, so traditional image segmentation is unable to achieve precise segmentation. In the paper, the image segmentation process based on MRF (Markov random field) model is studied, and a practical method of estimating model parameters is proposed. Through analyzing the impact of chosen model parameters, a sonar imagery segmentation algorithm based on fixed parameters’ MRF model is proposed. Both of the segmentation effect and the low computing load are gained. By applying the algorithm to the synthesized texture image and actual side-scan sonar image, the algorithm can be achieved with precise segmentation result.