Contourlet is a new 22D signa l ana lysis tool as well as wavelet ana lysis. It provides a flexible multiresolution local and directiona l image expansion, and ismore suitable for image processing than othermath tools. Inth is paper, an IKONOS imagewith forests is decomposed by Contourlet transformation, then amethod for extractingthe boundary of forests from high-resolution remote sensing imagery is proposed associated watershed transformationand texture analysis. The experiment showed that themethod could extract the boundary of forests accurately.