The invention proposes a curvelet domain enhancement method for a low-illumination-level power equipment image, and solves a problem that the degradation of a low-illumination-level power equipment image is severe. The method comprises the steps: converting the low-illumination-level power equipment image into an HIS space, decomposing a brightness parameter through curvelet transformation, and obtaining subband components at different scales and in different direction, so as to construct a human eye vision model; carrying out the nonlinear enhancement of a high-frequency component through brightness shading and brightness-contrast shading characteristics of the model, and carrying out the nonlinear stretching of a low-frequency component; finally reconstructing the brightness parameter through the curvelet inverse transformation, converting the image into an original color space through combining with chromaticity and saturability components of the original image, and obtaining an enhanced low-illumination-level power equipment image. The method can effectively improve the contrast and brightness of the low-illumination-level power equipment image, maintains the detail informationof the image, and inhibits the image noises.