Disclosed is a display device capable of compensating unevenness in brightness caused by physical restrictions of a display device or degradation in image quality caused by a partial reduction in contrast occurring in the local dimming technology using human visual characteristics. A liquid crystal panel (101) modulates illuminating light in accordance with the transmittance, and displays images on a screen. A backlight (102) emits the illuminating light to the liquid crystal panel (101) such that amounts of the illuminating light differ for each light emitting area of the screen. A backlight control unit (106) controls emission brightness of the backlight (102) for each light emitting area. A local gradation converting unit (104) performs gradation conversion on an image signal, and acquires a brightness value for each pixel after the conversion. A backlight driving unit (107) controls the transmittance for each pixel on the basis of the acquired brightness values after the conversion. The local gradation converting unit sets conversion characteristics for pixels to be processed in the image signal such that the brightness values of the pixels to be processed are low as the lightness of the periphery of the pixels to be processed is high, and performs gradation conversion using the set conversion characteristics.