In this paper, we propose a new active contour algorithm, i.e. hierarchical contextual active contour (HCAC), and apply it to automatic liver segmentation from three-dimensional CT (3D-CT) images. HCAC is a learning-based method and can be divided into two stages. At the first stage, i.e. the training stage, given a set of abdominal 3D-CT training images and the corresponding manual liver labels, we tried to establish a mapping between automatic segmentations (in each round) and manual reference segmentations via context features, and obtained a series of self-correcting classifiers. At the second stage, i.e. the segmentation stage, we firstly used the basic active contour to segment the image and subsequently used the contextual active contour (CAC) iteratively, which combines the image information and the current shape model, to improve the segmentation result. The current shape model is produced by the corresponding self-correcting classifier (the input is the previous automatic segmentation result). The proposed method was evaluated on the datasets of MICCAI 2007 liver segmentation challenge. The experimental results showed that we would get more and more accurate segmentation results by the iterative steps and the satisfied results would be obtained after about six rounds of iterations.