1. A method for image segmentation comprising the steps of: representing n-dimensional image data as an m-dimensional structure to form an image representation using a graph-search approach, wherein said n-dimensional image data represents an image that depicts multiple objects and each of the multiple objects has one or more surfaces; forming one or more regions of a q-ary object interaction to form a specified q-ary inter-object relationship; calculating a cost functional related to the m-dimensional structure and the one or more regions of the q-ary object interaction; and segmenting the n-dimensional image data with one or more layer surfaces of multiple objects using the cost functional, the image representation, and the specified q-ary inter-object relationship to produce segmented layers, thereby simultaneously segmenting the image that depicts multiple objects.