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Abstract Knee disorders are common among the human population. Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is the most widespread knee joint disorder, which may require surgical treatment. The detection and diagnosis of knee joint disorders from medical images demand enormous human effort and time. The development of a computer‐aided diagnosis (CAD) system can notably minimise the burden of medical experts and remove the intra‐observer and inter‐observer variations. To achieve the goal, the highly challenging research problem of knee image segmentation has been frequently paid attention in past years, which can be efficiently applied in the development of the CAD system. Knee image segmentation is a challenging task owing to the image contrasts, intensity variations, shape irregularities, and the presence of thin cartilage structures. Therefore, this paper presents a literature review of automated segmentation approaches mainly focused on the segmentation of knee cartilage and bone, with respect to the underlying technical aspects, datasets used, and the performance reported. The paper also presents the growth from classical segmentation approaches towards the deep learning approaches in the knee image segmentation. Owing to the varying quality and complexity of different knee image datasets, this paper abstains from doing a rigorous comparative evaluation of image segmentation approaches.