The development of high dynamic range (HDR) display arouses the research of inverse tone mapping methods, which expand dynamic range of the low dynamic range (LDR) image to match that of HDR monitor. This paper proposed a novel physiological approach, which could avoid artifacts occurred in most existing algorithms. Inspired by the property of the human visual system (HVS), this dynamic range expansion scheme performs with a low computational complexity and a limited number of parameters and obtains high-quality HDR results. Comparisons with three recent algorithms in the literature also show that the proposed method reveals more important image details and produces less contrast loss and distortion.