Image segmentation is a hot point in the research field of automatic target recognition of SAR image. In order to segment the MSTAR image automatically, a new adaptive method is proposed. Firstly, 2D Gabor filters with various orientations and scales are used to enhance the original image, which can effectually reduce speckle noise in the background, and smooth the interior of the homogeneous regions. Then the analysis of the statistical characteristics of the enhanced image is made, based on which the adaptive thresholding rules is presented for the automatically segmentation of the images. Experiment results with the MSTAR images indicate that the algorithm presented has advantage of segmentation accuracy, calculation efficiency and noise robustness over the traditional methods, such as OTSU, FCM and MRF.