Low contrast and large noise are two main characteristics of infrared image.Considering this characteristics,a novel scheme for infrared image enhancement based on Contourlet transform and fuzzy operator is proposed.Firstly,Contourlet transform is performed on the original infrared image,we can obtain low-pass subband and band-pass subband at different scales and directions.At low-pass subband,the linear transformation based on the maximal and minimal coefficient of subband is applied to enhance the global contrast.At band-pass subband,the noise threshold is estimated and denoising is carried out,then the fuzzy nonlinear enhancement operator is used to enhance the high frequency subband coefficient,the objective characteristics of the edge texture is enhanced,but the background is suppressed.Finally,the inverse transform of Contourlet is applied to produce enhanced infrared image.Through computer simulation and compareing with other common image enhancement scheme,the proposed scheme can suppress noise,enhance contrast and highlight the edge of the image texture information and details effectively.