The purpose of image segmentation is to achieve effective extraction of objects of interest in images. In thermal infrared human target detection, the quality of image segmentation directly affects the execution accuracy and efficiency of subsequent links. Due to the weak nature of thermal infrared images, the information that can be used to segment human objects in images is less and difficult to use, which poses a huge challenge to the performance of image segmentation methods. Based on an overview of the commonly used segmentation methods for thermal infrared images, the editor will analyze and discuss several human target segmentation methods based on the active contour model in the follow-up.