Abstract: This paper presents a new enhanced method of color image based on Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) and Pulse Coupled Neural Networks (PCNN), according to the porceptual character of human visual system in HSV space. First, luminance V is decomposed to low frequency coefficients and high frequency coefficients by NSCT, the low frequency coefficients are enhanced by PCNN and corrected, the high frequency coefficients are linear transformed and inverse NSCT is performed to reconstruct the enhanced luminance V. Then, the saturation S is slightly enhanced by power to increase image contrast. Last, the color image is transformed from HSV color space to RGB color space. Experiments illustrate that the proposed method can retain a visual quality and objective evaluation index, this algorithm can not only correct nonuniform illumination in images, but also maintain a good image color and the local details.