Abstract: In view of defects that common bilateral filtering algorithm is easy to loss image details and Retinex algorithm is easy to appear phenomenon of halo artifacts when light and darkness changes violently, an image enhancement method based on bilateral filtering and multi-scale Retinex algorithm was proposed. Firstly, the image is decomposed to obtain high frequency and low frequency coefficients; then, the low frequency coefficients of the image are processed by the multi scale Rentinex algorithm and the bilateral filtering scheme, and the high frequency coefficients of the image are processed by soft threshold filtering algorithm; finally, the enhanced spatial domain image is obtained by discrete wavelet inverse transform, and the local contrast is enhanced by adaptive enhancement. The experimental results show that the method can effectively improve the image color distortion with rich details and strong contrast, which lays the foundation for the subsequent features extraction.