Abstract: The spectral characteristics preservation and the high spatial resolution retention are the key to image fusion.A new adaptive remote sensing image fusion algorithm based on traditional IHS transform and unsubsampled contourlet transform(NSCT) is proposed.The original I component of IHS and the panchromatic image are decomposed into a multi-resolution representation by using NSCT.The approximated images and detail images resulting from the unsubsampled transform are fused in each level of pyramid and various directions of input resources based on local coefficients feature.This paper proposes fusion algorithms aiming at the approximated images and detail images respectively.Then the fusion image can be obtained by performing an inverse unsubsampled transform and an inverse IHS transform.Five indices are used to assess the new method comparing with the usual traditional IHS method,wavelet fusion method,and the contourlet transform based method.A set of multi-spectral and panchromatic images are used in the test,the experimental results show that the effect of the proposed method is more satisfactory.