Aiming at the regional homogeneity and processing of the edges in course of image fusion, a novel image fusion algorithm for visible and infrared images based on polyharmonic local sine transform is proposed. The polynomial u of the source images are fused with average in order to extract the global feature, and the residual v are fused in the field of Fourier sine transform to keep region homogeneity and extract details of the visible image. The polyharmonic local sine transform avoids the disadvantages of edge effect. Combing this advantage with the quickly decaying coefficients of the residuals, polyharmonic local sine transform is effective for image fusion. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the visual effect, and enhances the contrast and information entropy.