Abstract: The traditional image compression algorithms have some problems, one of which is that they cannot recognize the interesting gray scale automatically. Besides, the useful information may be lost after compression. In this paper, a false color tone mapping method was proposed to show the high-bit gray images. Firstly, the gray levels were sampled and mapped into the H layer of HSV color space. Secondly,the gray levels were compressed so that they fall into the rang from 0 to 255 and mapped into the V layer. Thirdly, the image was normalized and mapped into the S layer. Finally, the image display was transferred from HSV space to RGB space. Subjective and objective assessments show that the proposed method can show the details of high-bit images to the utmost extent.