The cell overlapping and adhesion phenomenon often exists in cell image processing. Separating overlapped cell into single ones is of great important and difficult in cell image quantitative analysis and automatic recognition. In this paper, an algorithm based on concave region extraction and erosion limit has been proposed to judge and separate overlapping cell images. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a good separation effects on analog cell images. Then the method is applying in actual cervical cell image and obtains good separation result.