A fusion method for infrared and visual images based on local energy and non-subsampled Contourlet transform (NSCT) is proposed. The two original images are decomposed into a low frequency subband image and a few high frequency subband images by NSCT. The maximum selection rule is used to fuse the low frequency subband and the high frequency subbands are merged with local energy match degree. The match degree of the two corresponding local energy in high frequency subbands is computed and the match degree threshold is obtained, if the match degree is less than threshold, the maximum of local energy is used to fuse the high frequency subbands, otherwise, the weighted local energy is used to fuse high frequency subbands. The fused image using the inverse transform of NSCT is reconstructed. The experimental results show that fusion method can get better visual effect and preserve image detail information of original image. Comparing with other fusion methods based on NSCT, the entropy is increased by 0.5%~6.8% , the space frequency is increased by 1% ~13% and the standard deviation is increased by 0~24.1%, it is an effective and simple fusion method.