Recently, a two-dimensional (2-D) Tsallis entropy thresholding method has been proposed as a new method for image segmentation. But the computation complexity of 2-D Tsallis entropy is very large and becomes an obstacle to real time image processing systems. A fast recursive algorithm for 2-D Tsallis entropy thresholding is proposed. The key variables involved in calculating 2-D Tsallis entropy are written in recursive form. Thus, many repeating calculations are avoided and the computation complexity reduces to O(L2) from O(L4). The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is illustrated by experimental results.