Image fusion is the process of fusing multiple images of the same scene to obtain a more informative image for human eye perception. In this paper, a new fusion framework based on Quaternion Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (QNSCT) and Guided Filter detail enhancement is designed to address the problems of inconspicuous infrared targets and poor background texture in Infrared and visible image fusion. The proposed method uses the quaternion wavelet transform for the first time instead of the traditional Non-Subsampled Pyramid Filter Bank structure in the Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT). The flexible multi-resolution of quaternion wavelet and the multi-directionality of NSCT are fully utilized to refine the multi-scale decomposition scheme. On the other hand, the coefficient matrix obtained from the proposed QNSCT algorithm is fused using a weight refinement algorithm based on the guided filter. The fusion scheme is divided into four steps. First, the Infrared and visible images are decomposed into multi-directional and multiscale coefficient matrices using QNSCT. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm not only extracts important visual information from the source image, but also preserves the texture information in the scene better. Meanwhile, the scheme outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both subjective and objective evaluations. © 2022 Elsevier GmbH