Abstract: The fused images obtained by the existing image fusion methods, often have low contrast, and retain the textural details insufficiently. In order to overcome the above problems, a new fusion method based on image contrast enhancement for the infrared and visible images is proposed in this paper. Firstly, in order to improve the visibility of low-light details of the visible image, an adaptive image enhancement method based on dynamic range compression and linear transformation is proposed; secondly, the infrared information is effectively injected into the visible image by using a novel hybrid multi-scale image fusion method based on the guided and Gaussian filters; finally, the fused image is post-processed by non-local mean filtering, so that the final fused image is more consistent with human visual perception. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain better image fusion results, and it is superior to the existing common used image fusion methods both in subjective and objective evaluation.