In this paper

we review the past 15 years of research in the field of night vision multi-sensor image coloration (render night vision image in color) and reveal the general coloration model. On this basis

a new coloration method using fast multi-modulation fusion (FMMF) and color transfer is designed for low-light and infrared image pairs. The coloration process is based on YCbCr color space. First

the fused image uses a fast multi-modulation fusion to merge the source images information to be assigned to the Y channel;then

the Cb and Cr channel is combined using Toet’s method

which extracts the common component from the source images. Finally

the false-color image is obtained by using color transfer technology to the prior pseudo-color YCbCr image. Experiments show that the result of our method is information that is more salient

has a higher color contrast

and a more natural color appearance than others. Due to the use of fast multi-modulation fusion

the coloration process is efficient and the parameters are adaptive

and our method meets the real-time applications.