In order to improve the automation degree of solder joint positioning by using the existing automatic opticalinspection systems,an intelligent positioning algorithm based on color features is proposed.In this algorithm,theinitial color thresholds of solar joint segmentation are calculated by statistically analyzing the gray histograms of solderjoint regions,and a minimum pixel loss method is used to correct the initial thresholds and to further obtain theoptimal threshold.Thus,the solder joint color is automatically extracted.Moreover,during the positioning,the imagesof solder joints are binarized with the obtained threshold,and the optical location of solder joints are fastsearched by using the optimized maximum area method.Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm iseffective because it helps to obtain properly-extracted solder joint images with small positioning error and high positioningspeed that meets the practical application requirements well.