Summary: In this paper an interactive, semiautomatic image segmentation method is presented which, processes the color information of each pixel as a unit, thus avoiding color information scattering. The process has only two steps: 1) The manual selection of few sample pixels of the color to be segmented in the image; and 2) The automatic generation of the so called Color Similarity Image (CSI), which is just a gray level image with all the tonalities of the selected colors. The color information of every pixel is integrated in the segmented image by an adaptive color similarity function designed for direct color comparisons. The color integrating technique is direct, simple, and computationally inexpensive and it has also good performance in gray level and low contrast images.