Multilevel thresholding is an important technique for image processing and pattern recognition. The maximum entropy thresholding (MET) has been widely applied in the literature. In this paper, a new multilevel MET algorithm based on the technology of the shuffled frog-leaping (SFLO) algorithm is proposed: called the maximum entropy based shuffled frog-leaping algorithm thresholding (MESFLOT) method. The SFLO had been applied to solve the optimization problem such as image thresholding. Four different methods are compared to this proposed method: the particle swarm optimization (PSO), the hybrid cooperative-comprehensive learning based PSO algorithm (HCOCLPSO), the Fast Otsu’s method and the honey bee mating optimization (HBMO). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MESFLOT algorithm can search for multiple thresholds which are very close to the optimal ones examined by the exhaustive search method. Compared to the other four thresholding methods, the segmentation results of using the MESFLOT algorithm is the most, however, the computation time by using the MESFLOT algorithm is shorter than that of the other four methods.