Microcirculation images often have uneven illumination and low contrast in the acquisition process, which affect the image reorganization and following process. This paper presents a new method for microcirculatory image illumination correction and con-trast enhancement based on the Contourlet transform. Initially, the image illumination model is extracted by Contourlet transform and then uneven illumination is corrected. Next, in order to restrain noise and enhance image contrast, the probability function asso-ciated with noise coefficient and edge coefficient is established and applied to all Contour-let coefficients. Then, a nonlinear enhancement function is applied to modified Contourlet coefficient to adaptively enhance image contrast. Finally, the enhanced image is obtained by inverse Contourlet transform. We compare this approach with other contrast enhance-ment methods, result showing that our method has a better effect than other enhancement methods, which might be helpful for clinical diagnostics of microcirculation.