Image segmentation is an essential complementary process in digital image processing and computer vision, but mostly utilizes simple segmentation techniques, such as fixed partitioning scheme and global thresholding techniques due to their simplicity and popularity, in spite of their inefficiency. This paper introduces a new split-merge segmentation process for a quadtree scheme of colour images, based on exploiting the spatial and spectral information embedded within the bands and between bands, respectively. The results show that this technique is efficient in terms of quality of segmentation and time, which can be used in standard techniques as alternative to a fixed partitioning scheme.