This paper proposes a global multi-level thresholding method for image segmentation. As a criterion for this, the traditional method uses the Shannon entropy, originated from information theory, considering the gray level image histogram as a probability distribution, while we applied the Tsallis entropy as a general information theory entropy formalism. For the algorithm, we used the artificial bee colony approach since execution of an exhaustive algorithm would be too time-consuming. The experiments demonstrate that: 1) the Tsallis entropy is superior to traditional maximum entropy thresholding, maximum between class variance thresholding, and minimum cross entropy thresholding; 2) the artificial bee colony is more rapid than either genetic algorithm or particle swarm optimization. Therefore, our approach is effective and rapid.