A novel hierarchical image fusion scheme based on contrast pyramid decomposition is presented. The basic idea is that: first to perform a contrast pyramid decomposition of each source image, and then the contrast pyramid of the fused image is constructed by using region based weighted operators according to different fusion rules, finally the fused image is obtained by taking inverse pyramid transform. This approach has been successfully used in image fusion. In addition, with the use of the parameters such as entropy, cross entropy, mutual information, root mean square error and peak to peak signal to noise ratio, the performance of the fusion scheme is evaluated and analyzed. The experimental results show that the fusion scheme is effective.