For the fusion of visual and infrared images,a new method is proposed based on the contourlet transform and fuzzy theory.Firstly,the source images are decomposed using contourlet transform.Secondly,the contourlet coefficients are fused with different rules.Fuzzy theory is used to fuse low frequency sub-band,which can adaptively calculate the wavelet coefficients weights of original images.While the high frequency sub-bands are merged with local energy as weight.Ultimately,the fusion image is obtained through an inversed contourlet transform.The experimental results show that the fusion scheme can get better visual effect and preserve image detail information of the original images.It is an effective and practical fusion method.