The present invention provides a method and apparatus to enhance the image contrast of a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) device while simultaneously compensating for image inhomogeneity, regardless of the source. The method makes no assumptions as to the source of the inhomogeneities, e.g., physical coil characteristics or patient placement. In the method, the error between the histogram of the spatially-weighted original image and a specified histogram is minimized. The specified histogram may be selected to increase tissue contrast generally or to accentuate a particular tissue class. The weighting is achieved by two-dimensional interpolation of a sparse grid of control points overlaying the image. The sparse grid is used rather than a dense one to compensate for the slowly varying image non-uniformity. Also, sparseness reduces the computational complexity as the final weight set involves the solution of simultaneous linear equations whose number is the size of the chosen grid.