A method includes acquiring projection data of an object from a plurality of detector elements, reconstructing the acquired projection data into a first reconstructed image, and performing material characterization of an image volume of the first reconstructed image to reduce a number of materials analyzed in the image volume to two basis materials. Performing material characterization includes utilizing a generalized modeling function to estimate a fraction of at least one basis material within each voxel of the image volume. The method also includes generating a re-mapped image volume for the at least one basis material of the two basis materials, performing forward projection on at least the re-mapped image volume for the at least one basis material to produce a material-based projection, and generating multi-material corrected projections based on the material-based projection and a total projection attenuated by the object, which represents both of the two basis materials.