Abstract: We need a reliable adaptive image contrast enhancement in real-time processing such as digital TV postprocessing.This goal is achieved by an improved adaptive unsharp masking image enhancement algorithm in the paper.The proposed improved adaptive unsharp masking filter controls the contribution of the sharpening path by the output of Laplacian and works in such a way that contrast enhancement occurs in high detail areas and little or no image sharpening occurs in smooth areas.The experiment shows that this improved algorithm greatly reduce the complexity of computing and can be reliably used.The results also show that from both a BV/DV and a visual quality,the proposed filter outperforms the original filter for different test images