In this paper, a novel image fusion method based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm and steerable pyramid is proposed. The registered images are first decomposed by using steerable pyramid. The EM algorithm is used to fuse the image components in the low frequency band. The selection method involving the informative importance measure is applied to those in the high frequency band. The final fused image is then computed by taking the inverse transform on the composite coefficient representations. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional image fusion methods.