An efficient and highly reliable automatic selection of optimal segmentation algorithm for characterizing particulate matter is presented in this paper. Support vector machines (SVMs) are used as a new self-regulating classifier trained by gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) of the image. This matrix is calculated at various angles and the texture features are evaluated for classifying the images. Results show that the performance of GLCM-based SVMs is drastically improved over the previous histogram-based SVMs. Our proposed GLCM-based approach of training SVM predicts a robust and more accurate segmentation algorithm than the standard histogram technique, as additional information based on the spatial relationship between pixels is incorporated for image classification. Further, the GLCM-based SVM classifiers were more accurate and required less training data when compared to the artificial neural network (ANN) classifiers. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.