Abstract: With the particular research on infrared and color visible images, a color image fusion algorithm based on Luminance-contrast Transfer(LCT) technique is presented. Firstly, the method employs a grayscale fusion approach to fuse the infrared image and the luminance component of the color visible image. Then, it uses the LCT technique to improve the luminance and contrast of the grayscale fused result. Finally, the color fused image is generated directly in the RGB space with the fast YCBCR transform fusion scheme. Two different strategies which employ the pixel averaging fusion approach and the multiresolution fusion approach as the grayscale fusion solution are proposed to implement the high real-time and high fusion quality, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can produce a color fused image not only with the natural color appearance similar as that of the input color visible image, but with pleasing luminance and contrast, and can also provide a good result even using the pixel averaging scheme to implement the grayscale fusion.