A new method to reduce the streak artifacts caused by high attenuation objects in CT images has been developed. The key part of this approach is a preprocessing procedure based on the raw projection data using an adaptive scaling-plus-filtering method. The procedure is followed by the conventional filtered-back projection to reconstruct artifact-reduced images. Phantom and clinical studies have demonstrated that the proposed method can effectively reduce the streak artifacts caused by high attenuation objects for different anatomical structures and metal materials while still faithfully reproduce the positions and dimensions of the metal objects. The visualization of tissue features adjacent to metal objects is greatly improved. The proposed method is computational efficient and can be easily adapted to the current commercial CT scanners.