Abstract: In order to improve the brightness and contrast of the low illumination image while maintaining the color naturalness of the image, a low illumination image enhancement method based on multi-scale adaptive Gamma correction is proposed. In view of that the degree of light and shade of image is determined by the lightness component I of HSI color space, and the multi-scale characteristic of lightness component. Firstly, the image is converted to HSI color space, and the brightness component I is decomposed by multi-scale Retinex. Then, respectively, the decomposed multi-scale illumination images are subjected to adaptive Gamma correction, in which the Gamma index is adaptive to the proportion of pixels in the dark area, robustly improve the illumination distribution of the illumination image, the enhanced multi-scale brightness components are obtained by Retinex inverse transformation. Finally, the linear fusion of enhanced multi-scale lightness components is used as the enhanced brightness component I', which is recombined with the hue component H and saturation component S to obtain the final enhanced image. The experimental results show that compared with some existing newly proposed methods, the proposed method are 1.19 dB and 1.8% higher than those of the some existing methods proposed recently, the proposed method shows better enhancement effect and robustness, the visual effect of its enhanced images is more suitable with higher contrast.