Ancient Chinese tablets are invaluable in terms of historical and aesthetic value. Automatic character segmentation of images from degraded tablets poses a challenging problem. Therefore, this paper proposes a new character segmentation method that utilizes an enhanced stroke filter and an energy propagation process based on local layout information. A ground-truth dataset was established to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm adopted by the proposed segmentation method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can effectively extract characters from low-quality ancient Chinese tablet images.