Abstract: To the fusion of gray-scale visible light and infrared images, an image fusion method based on improved nonsubsampled
contourlet transform(NSCT) is proposed. Unlike the classic NSCT model, the improved NSCT substitutes
redundant lifting non-separable wavelet(RLNSW) for the former NSP decomposition mechanism whose performance of
capturing the detail information is not good to realize the multi-scale decomposition of the source images. Then, the lowfrequency
coefficients and high-frequency coefficients for the fused image can be obtained by means of the fusion rule based
on region mean energy matching degree, neighborhood coefficient deviation and information entropy, respectively. Finally,
the fused image is reconstructed by the inverse improved NSCT. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed
method.