Infrared and visible image fusion combines the infrared thermal radiation information and visible detail information. The image fusion technique has facilitated development in numerous fields, including production, life sciences, military surveillance and others, and has become a key research direction in the field of image technology. According to the core idea, fusion framework and research progress of image fusion methods, the fusion methods based on multi-scale transformation, sparse representation, neural network, etc. are elaborated and compared, and the application status of infrared and visible light image fusion in various fields and the commonly used the evaluation index. The most representative methods and evaluation indicators are selected and applied to six different scenes in order to verify the advantages and disadvantages of each one. Finally, the existing problems of infrared and visible image fusion methods are experimentally analyzed and summarized , the development prospects of infrared and visible image fusion technology are presented.