The technology of the capsule endoscope for the detection of the gastrointestinal disease has made a major breakthrough. But the clinical feedback show that some problems are to be solved, including the problem of the location and tracking. Among the possible localization technologies, the magnetic positioning technology with advantages of no need for power and not much space occupation and so on, is very suitable to be applied to the problem of localization of the capsule endoscope. In this paper, for the positioning model of the magnetic dipole based on the magnetic positioning technology, a new algorithm —— hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm was proposed and compared with the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm and the nonlinear optimization algorithms that the random complex algorithm and the levenberg - marquart (LM) algorithm. The experimental results show that in terms of the positioning accuracy, the stability and the anti-noise ability, the hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm has better performance than the other three methods.