In this paper, the novel approach for image contrast enhancement is introduced. The method is based on the unsharp mask and directional information of images. Since the unsharp mask techniques give better visual quality than the conventional sharpening mask, there are much works on image enhancement using unsharp masks. The proposed algorithm decomposes the image to several blocks and extracts directional information using DCT. From the geometric properties of the block, each block is labeled as appropriate type and processed by adaptive unsharp mask. The masking process is skipped at the flat area to reduce the noise artifact, but at the texture and edge area, the adaptive unsharp mask is applied to enhance the image contrast based on the edge direction. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm produces the contrast enhanced images with superior visual quality, suppressing the noise effects and enhancing edge at the same time.