Abstract: For the fusion problem of visible and infrared image of the same scene， a novel image fusion algorithm is proposed based on the nonsubsampled contourlet transform. For choosing the low-frequency coefficients， we propose a weighted average scheme based on the physical features of images. With the high-frequency coefficients， a selection principle is proposed based on region contrast and spatial frequency ratio. In order to verify the effectiveness of proposed algorithm， the experiment upon visible and infrared image are done. The experimental results show that the method compared with the traditional simple fusion method and the regional energy fusion rule can be better in visual quality and objective evaluation criteria.