A novel image fusion method based on wavelet multi-resolution decomposition was presented.In the fusion scheme,with the use of wavelet transform,the source images were decomposed into components with different resolutions and directions first.And then,the wavelet coefficients for the fused image can be obtained by means of the fusion rules based on directive contrast and area-based maximum standard deviation.Finally,the fused image was reconstructed by inverse wavelet transform.The experimental results show that the fusion algorithm presented here is much effective.