A new two-step framework is proposed for image segmentation. In the first step, the gray-value distribution of the given image is reshaped to have larger inter-class variance and less intra-class variance. In the sec- ond step, the discriminant-based methods or clustering-based methods are performed on the reformed distribution. It is focused on the typical clustering methods-Gaussian mixture model （GMM） and its variant to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework. Due to the independence of the first step in its second step, it can be integrated into the pixel-based and the histogram-based methods to improve their segmentation quality. The experiments on artificial and real images show that the framework can achieve effective and robust segmentation results.
