An apparatus and method are provided for computed tomography (CT) imaging to reduce artifacts due to objects outside the field of view (FOV) of a reconstructed image. The artifacts are suppressed by using an iterative reconstruction method to minimize a cost function that includes a de-emphasis operator. The de-emphasis operator operates in the data domain, and minimizes the contributions of data inconsistencies arising from attenuation due to objects outside the FOV. This can be achieved by penalizing images that manifest indicia of artifacts due to outside objects especially those outside objects have high-attenuation densities and minimizing components of the data inconsistency likely attributable to the outside object.