The invention relates to an adaptive low-illumination visible image and infrared image fusion method, and belongs to the field of digital image processing. The method comprises the steps: image preprocessing, NSCT transformation, frequency domain coefficient fusion and an NSCT inversion. The method mainly achieves the multi-scale decomposition of a bright image and an infrared visible image, extracts high-frequency components and low-frequency components, and selects different fusion rules to carry out the frequency domain fusion according to the characteristics of the high-frequency components and low-frequency components. The NSCT inversion part is mainly used for carrying out the multi-scale inversion of the obtained fusion high-frequency and low-frequency components, obtaining the gray scale image after fusion, then carrying out the weighting of the gray scale image after fusion and an original color visible image, and obtaining a color fusion image. The method can effectively keep more detail information of the original image, can improve the contrast and resolution of the fusion image, and can be widely used in the fields of intelligent traffic, video monitoring, medical diagnosis, target detection and national defense security.