Medical Image Fusion using the Convolution of Meridian Distributions

The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel non-Gaussian statistical model-based approach for medical image fusion based on the Meridian distribution. The paper also includes a new approach to estimate the parameters of generalized Cauchy distribution. The input images are first decomposed using the Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT-CWT) with the subband coefficients modelled as Meridian random variables. Then, the convolution of Meridian distributions is applied as a probabilistic prior to model the fused coefficients, and the weights used to combine the source images are optimised via Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation. The superior performance of the proposed method is demonstrated using medical images.