1. A method, comprising: acquiring projection data of an object from a plurality of pixels; applying a single material beam hardening correction to the acquired projection data from the plurality of pixels; reconstructing the single material beam hardening corrected projection data from the plurality of pixels into a reconstructed image; performing material characterization and decomposition of an image volume of the reconstructed image to reduce a number of materials analyzed in the image volume to two basis materials, wherein one of the two basis materials comprises the single material used in the applied single material beam hardening correction; generating a re-mapped image volume for the single material used in the single material beam hardening correction; performing forward projection on at least the re-mapped image volume for the single material used in the single material beam hardening correction to produce a material-based projection; generating multi-material corrected projections based on the material-based projection and a total projection attenuated by the scanned object; reconstructing a multi-material corrected image from the multi-material corrected projections; and performing one or more iterations of a multi-material correction on the multi-material corrected image.