Abstract: According to the characteristics of the coefficients of non-subsampled Contourlet transform(NSCT), new fusion rules for low and high frequency in NSCT domain are developed. Furthermore, a new multi-focus image fusion algorithm is proposed by combing the edge detection algorithm based on region segmentation. Perform NSCT transform on the two source images, the low frequency coefficients and high frequency coefficients are obtained, the low frequency coefficients are fused by the weighted average of statistical features of local variance, local spatial frequency and sum of local modified Laplacian energy, while the high frequency coefficients are fused by local texture features; then, the preliminary fused image is obtained by inverse NSCT transform; finally, the clear area is identified according to the residual images of the preliminary fused image and the source images, edge of clear area is detected, and the final fused image is obtained by covering the edge information to the preliminary fused image. Experiments are conducted to compare the proposed algorithm with the algorithms of traditional DWT, NSCT transform, and the algorithm of NSCT domain based on the visual characteristics. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can get better visual effect and higher evaluation index values(including the average gradient, spatial frequency, mutual information and edge preserving degree).