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The contrast enhancement of infrared image is useful and important to the infrared image system. The current techniques of local enhancing exists either over-enhancing or high complexity problems. In this paper, we propose a novel contrast enhancement algorithm which combines histogram equalization based methods (HEBM) and an improved unsharp masking based methods (UMBM). This proposed algorithm uses HEBM to achieve global contrast enhancement and UMBM to achieve local contrast enhancement. Some elaborate strategies are applied to the algorithm to avoid the overenhancement and magnification of noise when contrast is enhanced. The article is organized as follows. First, we review the techniques developed in the literature for contrast enhancement. After then, we introduce the new algorithm in details. The performance of the proposed method is studied on experimental IR data and compared with those yielded by two well established algorithms. The developed algorithm has good performance in global contrast and local contrast enhancement with noise and artifact suppression.