The Mumford-Shah energy functional is a successful image segmentation model.It is a non-convex variational problem and lacks of good initialization techniques so far.In this paper,motivated by the fact that image histogram is a combination of several Gaussian distributions,and their centers can be considered as approximations of cluster centers,we introduce a histogram-based initialization method to compute the cluster centers.With this technique,we then devise an effective multi-region Mumford-Shah image segmentation method,and adopt the recent proximal alternating minimization method to solve the minimization problem.Experiments indicate that our histogram initialization method is more robust than existing methods,and our segmentation method is very effective for both gray and color images.