Abstract This paper proposes a novel phishing web image segmentation algorithm which based on improving spectral clustering.Firstly,we construct a set of points which are composed of spatial location pixels and gray levels from a given image.Secondly,the data is clustered in spectral space of the similar matrix of the set points,in order to avoid the drawbacks of K-means algorithm in the conventional spectral clustering method that is sensitive to initial clustering centroids and convergence to local optimal solution,we introduce the clone operator,Cauthy mutation to enlarge the scale of clustering centers,quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm to find the global optimal clustering centroids.Compared with phishing web image segmentation based on K-means,experimental results show that the segmentation performance of our method gains much improvement.Moreover,our method can convergence to global optimal solution and is better in accuracy of phishing web segmentation.