For those who are looking to combine 2 color images into one, this is a slight mod on Andrey's answer which worked for me :
img1 = cv2.imread(imageFile1)
img2 = cv2.imread(imageFile2)
h1, w1 = img1.shape[:2]
h2, w2 = img2.shape[:2]
#create empty matrix
vis = np.zeros((max(h1, h2), w1+w2,3), np.uint8)
#combine 2 images
vis[:h1, :w1,:3] = img1
vis[:h2, w1:w1+w2,:3] = img2