An insulator hydrophobic image segmentation device and method includes such step as equalizing local histogram of hydrophobic image by homomorphic filter; then the local contrast of the hydrophobic image is enhanced. Finally, the target region and background region of the hydrophobic image are used as the objective function to maximize the variance between classes, and the bat algorithm is used asthe threshold optimization algorithm for the adaptive threshold selection of the hydrophobic image segmentation, to achieve the hydrophobic image segmentation of insulators; an insulator hydrophobicimage segmentation device comprises a single chip microcomputer module, a head shaking steering engine, a head nodding steering engine, a DC water pump, an nRF24L01 wireless module and a power management module. The technical method and the device of the invention can better distinguish the background area and the water droplet area of the insulator, and provide a good basis for the classificationof the hydrophobic grade of the insulator.