Noises and complex backgrounds often make the thresholding of degraded document images a difficult job. In this paper, we propose a new threshold selection method to handle severely degraded document images. First, multiscale image description is adopted to analyze the image edge. From it, edge pixel pair information is derived and recorded by a graylevel co-occurrence matrix. An appropriate threshold value is chosen by measuring the edge pixel pair co-occurrence matrix. The new method is tested with degraded document images. The experimental results show it is resistant to noises and complex backgrounds.