Most of local region-based active contour models in terms of the level set approach are able to segment images with intensity inhomogeneity. However, these models do not utilize global statistical information and are quite sensitive to the initial placement of the contour. This paper presents a new global and local region-based active contour model to segment images with intensity inhomogeneity. First, in order to reduce number of iterations, the global energy functional of the Chan–Vese (C–V) model is used as the global term. Then, the local term is proposed to incorporate both local spatial information and local intensity information to handle intensity inhomogeneity. Moreover, to increase robustness of the initialization of the contour and reduce number of iterations, a convex energy functional and the dual algorithm are designed in the numerical implementation. Experimental results for synthetic and medical images have shown the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method.