Abstract: This paper presents a new methods that enhance the image of palm vein based on Contrast Limited Local Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) and Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) to overcome the influence of the uneven quality of local area. After making NSCT in the original image, CHLHE is used to enhance image contrast in the approximate coefficient, and in the detail cofficient, the threshold is determined adaptively according to the energy distribution of the different scale sub-pass directions, the details are enhanced by means of the non-linear enhancement algorithm. At last, the lines of the palm vein are enhanced by Gabor filter. The experiments show that this algorithm can improve the contrast of the vain images and the details of the outlines, and in addition it can effectively reduce the noise.