A novel image fusion method based on image segmentation and stationary wavelet transform (SWT) is proposed to improve the visual effect of fused infrared and visible light images. Infrared image is firstly separated into object and background region utilizing Otsu combined with edge detection. Then a multiresolution decomposition using SWT is made to the background region of the infrared image and the visible light image. Neighborhood spatial frequency and absolute value are adopted as fusion rules in low-frequency and high-frequency coefficients. The background fused image is reconstructed by inverse SWT. The final infrared and visible light fused image is obtained by fusing the background fused image and the object region of infrared image base on weighted fusion rule. The experimental results show that the object information of the infrared image is obviously highlighted and the scene information of the visible light image is well represented. The visual effect of fused image is improved efficiently by utilizing the proposed method. The proposed method works better than the traditional Laplacian Pyramid and wavelet transform fusion algorithms in terms of standard deviation, comentropy and mutual information. Experimental results verify its effectiveness.