Abstract: Image enhancement plays a vital role in image processing technique. This study presents a novel method for image enhancement by using Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) based discrete shearlet transform. In this proposed algorithm, the RGB image converted into HSI (Hue, Saturation and Intensity) Model where as intensity and Hue colour considered for image enhancement after conversion. The Hue component decomposed into directional co-efficient by discrete shearlet transform. The higher directional coefficients are eliminated as it causes artifact and unnatural efforts in a image and the intensity components of image is contrast enhanced by using ABC algorithm. The performance of the proposed image enhancement method is compared with existing histogram equalization and discrete shearlet transform based image enhancement. The result of the proposed method achieves satisfactory performance in visualization.