Abstract: Considering human visual system and characteristics of images, a novel image fusion strategy is presented for panchromatic high resolution image and multispectral image in nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain. The NSCT can give an asymptotic optimal representation of edges and contours in image by virtue of its characteristics of good multiresolution, shift-invariance, and high directionality. An intensity component addition strategy based on LHS transform is introduced into NSCT domain to preserve spatial resolution and color content. Experiments show that the fusion method proposed can improve spatial resolution and keep spectral information simultaneously, and that there are improvements both in visual effects and quantitative analysis compared with the traditional principle component analysis (PCA) method, intensity-hue-saturation (IHS) transform technique, wavelet transform weighted fusion method, corresponding wavelet transform-based fusion method, and contourlet transform-based fusion method.