The fusion technique of visible and infrared images has important significance in enhancing the information richness of the imaging areas. A fusion algorithm of visible and infrared images based on the multi-scale decomposition and saliency region extraction is proposed. The edge-preserved image smoothing algorithm is introduced to build the framework of multi-scale image decomposition. The source image is decomposed into base layer image and several detail layer images with different decomposition scales. Meanwhile, the saliency region maps are extracted in each decomposition layer combined with the guided filter. The final fusion image is obtained by the reconstruction of each decomposition layer with different weighting factor values in order to enhance the visual effect of the fusion information. The contrast experiments of objective and subjective evaluation are developed on different fusion algorithms and databases. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed algorithm has a superior objective and subjective evaluation performance on the fusion results. The fusion effect of algorithm is excellent and the applicability is good.