Abstract: To improve the measuring efficiency and accuracy of the width of tobacco strands, an image measurement method based on circles with different radii was proposed. By comparing with the existing ISO (International Organization of Standardization) projection method and the Hough transform method, the accuracy and efficiency of the three methods in measuring the width of tobacco strands were analyzed. The results showed that: 1) The maximum relative error of the width of standard strands measured by the proposed algorithm was 5%. There was no significant difference between the widths of 30 strands measured by the proposed method and the ISO projection method at the 95% confidence level. 2) Six tobacco strand samples were tested and compared with the Hough transform method, the measurement results of the proposed method were closer to the results of the ISO projection method. Ten repeatability experiments indicated that the maximum relative standard deviation of the width measured by the proposed method was 0.012%. The average time needed by the proposed method for measuring the width of the six samples was 2.5 min, as compared to 37.0 min used by the ISO projection method. Therefore, this method provides an efficient way for the accurate measurement of the width of tobacco strands.