A new image contrast enhancement technique, called histogram hyperbolization, is presented. It consists of a memoryless nonlinear, space-invarient transformation of the pixel brightness values. This transformation is based upon the histogram of the picture to be processed and the nature of human brightness perception. Examples show that this transformation yields images of increased intelligibility as compared to a similar and popular technique called histogram equalization. An application to spatial filtering is also presented and compared with homomorphic filtering.