A watersheds algorithm for relative potential energy is presented. The presented algorithm calculates the relative potential energy of watersheds and compares them with the preestablished thresholds to remove the unnecessary details and get the important contour information. This method is introduced on the basis of the fast watersheds model. As a result, over-segmentation is effectively restrained, region fusing is avoided and the efficiency improved accordingly. Experimental results have shown that, compared with the original region-fusing algorithm, the efficiency has increased by 14.3%, and that the over-segmentation phenomenon has been obviously improved.