At the present time, there are many image contrast enhancement methods where the main considerations are detail enhancement, noise suppression, and high contrast suppression. Traditional methods ignore the characteristics of the display or merely consider the display as a whole. However, due to the limited dynamic range of most display devices on the market, the difference between two adjacent grayscales of the display is often below the just noticeable difference of the human visual systems, which causes many image details to be invisible on the display. To solve this problem, we present a preprocessing method for image contrast enhancement. The method combines the characteristics of the human eye and the display to enhance the image by examining the local histogram. When displaying the processed image, the algorithm maintains as much image information as possible, and image details will not be lost due to the limits of the display device. Moreover, this algorithm performs well for noise suppression and high contrast suppression. The algorithm is an image enhancement method and can also be a correction method for images enhanced by other methods when prepared for display.