Computer vision applications require choosing operators and their parameters, in order to provide the best outcomes. Often, the users quarry on expert knowledge and must experiment many combinations to find manually the best one. As performance, time and accuracy are important, it is necessary to automate parameter optimization at least for crucial operators. In this paper, a novel approach based on an adaptive discrete cuckoo search algorithm (ADCS) is proposed. It automates the process of algorithms’ setting and provides optimal parameters for vision applications. This work reconsiders a discretization problem to adapt the cuckoo search algorithm and presents the procedure of parameter optimization. Some experiments on real examples and comparisons to other metaheuristic-based approaches: particle swarm optimization (PSO), reinforcement learning (RL) and ant colony optimization (ACO) show the efficiency of this novel method.