A multi-stage low-illuminance image enhancement network based on attention mechanism was proposed to solve the problem that the details of low-illuminance images are lost due to the overlapping of image contents and large brightness differences in some regions during the enhancement process of low-illuminance images. At the first stage, an improved multi-scale fusion module was used to perform preliminary image enhancement. At the second stage, the enhanced image information of the first stage was cascaded with the input of this stage, and the result was used as the input of the multi-scale fusion module in this stage. At the third stage, the enhanced image information of the second stage was cascaded with the input of the this stage, and the result was used as the input of the multi-scale fusion module in this stage. In this way, with the use of multi-stage fusion, not only the brightness of the image was improved adaptively, but also the details were retained adaptively. Experimental results on open datasets LOL and SICE show that compared to the algorithms and networks such as MSR (Multi-Scale Retinex) algorithm, gray Histogram Equalization (HE) algorithm and RetinexNet (Retina cortex Network), the proposed network has the value of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) 11.0% to 28.9% higher, and the value of Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) increased by 6.8% to 46.5%. By using multi-stage method and attention mechanism to realize low-illuminance image enhancement, the proposed network effectively solves the problems of image content overlapping and large brightness difference, and the images obtained by this network are more detailed and subjective recognizable with clearer textures.