Journal of Multimedia Processing and Technologies Yang Li, Shengyong Chen, Wei Huang 10 4 2019 https://doi.org/10.6025/jmpt/2019/10/4/138-151 http://www.dline.info/jmpt/fulltext/v10n4/jmptv10n4_2.pdf In order to suppress the noise adaptively while enhancing the image details, an adaptive image enhancement method based on genetic algorithm in Nonsubsampled Contourlet (NSCT) domain is proposed. The optimal parameters of the image enhancement function are obtained adaptively through genetic algorithm (GA). The NSCT high frequency sub-bands coefficients are processed by the image enhancement function, the coefficients which are less than the low threshold are set to 0 and the coefficients between the low threshold and the high threshold are enhanced. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can adaptively enhance the image details and suppress noise at the same time, the detail variance is significantly improved, and a better visual effect is obtained. The results processed by the proposed method are better than that by classical enhancement methods.