To improve the fusion performance of infrared and visible images and effectively retain the edge structure information of the image, a fusion algorithm based on iterative control of anisotropic diffusion and regional gradient structure is proposed. First, the iterative control operator is introduced into the anisotropic diffusion model to effectively control the number of iterations. Then, the image is decomposed into a structure layer containing detail information and a base layer containing residual energy information. According to the characteristics of different layers, different fusion schemes are utilized. The structure layer is fused by combining the regional structure operator and the structure tensor matrix, and the base layer is fused through the Visual Saliency Map. Finally, the fusion image is obtained by reconstructing the structure layer and the energy layer. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can not only effectively deal with the fusion of infrared and visible images but also has high efficiency in calculation.