It is the premise and basis of recognition and retrieval of ancient Chinese character for realizing automatic analysis of ancient Chinese layout images which is more difficulty than that of the normal printed layout images because of their complex structure. On the basis of the analysis and generalization of layout characteristics of ancient books, the paper puts forward a layout analysis method of ancient Chinese layout images based on LOF and wave threshold. Firstly, LOF-based classification algorithm was used to classify the projected segmentation regions of ancient book layout images, and the candidate mixed regions with segmentation problems were determined. Then, the adhesion parts of text and frame lines in the candidate mixed regions were segmented by using the wave threshold. Finally, the text regions in the ancient book layout were determined and output. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively separate the text area and the frame line areas in ancient Chinese layout images, and the layout classification and segmentation accuracy are 87.02% and 78.69% respectively.