This paper presents a novel approach to image fusion in the JPEG 2000 domain. In this scheme, compressed images are fused without the need for full decompression. The proposed method can be integrated with the existing JPEG 2000 tools. It offers several benefits: it avoids error propagation, allows for the development of error correction and protection mechanisms and reduces computational effort. This paper also presents a comparison with commonly used algorithms for image fusion and studies their performance in the presence of compression and transmission losses. The results show that the performance of the proposed method is superior to currently available techniques under noisy conditions.