In this paper, a novel method for lung nodule detection, segmentation and recognition using computed tomography (CT) images is presented. Our contribution consists of several steps. First, the lung area is segmented by active contour modeling followed by some masking techniques to transfer non-isolated nodules into isolated ones. Then, nodules are detected by the support vector machine (SVM) classifier using efficient 2D stochastic and 3D anatomical features. Contours of detected nodules are then extracted by active contour modeling. In this step all solid and cavitary nodules are accurately segmented. Finally, lung tissues are classified into four classes: namely lung wall, parenchyma, bronchioles and nodules. This classification helps us to distinguish a nodule connected to the lung wall and/or bronchioles (attached nodule) from the one covered by parenchyma (solitary nodule). At the end, performance of our proposed method is examined and compared with other efficient methods through experiments using clinical CT images and two groups of public datasets from Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) and ANODE09. Solid, non-solid and cavitary nodules are detected with an overall detection rate of 89%; the number of false positive is 7.3/scan and the location of all detected nodules are recognized correctly.