The present invention discloses a method for retrieving atmospheric aerosol based on statistical segmentation. Firstly a multi-band remote sensing image including an apparent reflectance and an aerosol optical thickness look-up table corresponding to a retrieval band is obtained, then pixels are partitioned and screened according to apparent reflectance segments of a mid-infrared 2.1 micrometer band. After that the retained pixel sets are further partitioned and screened according to the apparent reflectance segments of the mid-infrared 1.6 micrometer band. Finally the obtained pixel sets are partitioned into two categories according to the pixel number, one category including pixels having more pixels, the other including those with less pixels.The category with more pixels is taken as the reference part for retrieval. Specifically, the pixel sets are first searched for the clean segment, then the ground surface reflectivity of the clean segment is taken as the ground surface reflectivity of the whole pixel set, thereby obtaining the aerosol thickness value through retrieval. After that these pixels are taken as references to perform retrieval on the other category.The present invention can improve accuracy and resolution of the retrieval result of the bright ground surface area, and is applied to a wider range.