Image segmentation is one of the most important aspects of image processing that has many applications in image analysis, computer vision, and machine vision. So far, researchers have proposed many image segmentation algorithms that provide a relatively appropriate response for a particular application and over a specific type of input images. At the same time, they have not yet suggested a simple, fast, and efficient segmentation method that can apply to a wide range of natural and texture images. In this study, the authors present a new adaptive method for selecting Gabor filters using the image frequency content. Adaptive spectral features of the image are then extracted using only these selected filters from a Gabor filter bank. A pre-setting parameter Gabor filter is used to extract the gradient of each feature in x and y directions. Combining these features gradient, the texture gradient image is calculated, and then by selected markers for different texture regions and applying the marker-based watershed transform on texture gradient image, the authors present a new image segmentation method that has a less computational cost and yields better results compared to using all other filter banks. 12 IET Image Process.