A method of segmenting a digitized image includes providing a digitized image comprising a plurality of intensities corresponding to a domain of nodes on an N-dimensional grid, providing prior probabilities for a set of segments, and initializing probabilities that each node belongs to each segment, defining a weight between each pair of adjacent nodes in the image based on the intensity difference of each said node pair, formulating a set of equations that minimize an energy functional of the probabilities and weights, and solving said set of equations for the probability that each node belongs to each segment.