Abstract: Bit depth enhancement has great application value, such as low-bit image acquisition, high-bit display, and image compression. However, existing bit depth enhancement algorithms either cannot effectively suppress false contours that appear in low-bit images or require high-performance graphical processing units and a vast number of training samples, making them lack practicality. To this end, we propose an adaptive false contour elimination filter-based bit depth enhancement algorithm, named FACE-BDE. FACE-BDE consists of three innovative modules: a false contour elimination filter design module, an adaptive filter size selection module, and a false contour region detection module. Experiments show that our algorithm can preserve real contours and details when eliminating false contours of different sizes, thus achieving 0.28 dB gain on the testsets, and the visibility of false contours is significantly unnoticeable than that of similar algorithms.