The invention discloses an image enhancement method based on non-linear guiding filtering, and belongs to the technical field of image processing. Through establishing a local non-linear guiding filtering model, a corresponding guiding filtering coefficient is solved. In order to further improve efficiency and reduce time complexity, non-linear guiding filtering is performed after subsampling of an image, and then the size of the image is recovered to size of an original image through a bilinear interpolation method. The method can be applied in various different computer vision fields, such as image smoothing, image detail enhancement, HDR image compression, and fog elimination and balancing and other operation, and meanwhile an algorithm is simple and efficient in calculation, and good in realization.