Abstract: An infrared and visible image fusion algorithm is proposed based on visual saliency and non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). At first, the frequency tuned saliency detection method is improved by guided filter and applied to detect the saliency of infrared image. Then the infrared and visible light images are decomposed into low frequency and high-frequency sub-bands by NSCT. Finally the saliency map of infrared image is used to guide the fusion in low frequency sub-band, and the rule of maximum absolute value selection is used for the fusion in high frequency sub-band. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to several other algorithms, the proposed method highlights the IR targets and at the same time makes the fusion images have rich background information, and better visual fusion effects and objective quality evaluations are obtained.