Performance ranking of multiple nonlinear filters using ranking vector and voting fusion

Abstract

A lot of performance evaluation metrics exist for nonlinear filters. At present, the most commonly used one is a single and incomprehensive metric of performance. This metric can continuously and quantitatively describe the performance of the nonlinear filters. But in many cases, we need to rank the performance of the filters. It is in general very hard to rank the filters just using a single metric. First, the rankings using a single metric at different times may be different. Then how to get a unique rank for all times? A typical existing solution is to average the single metric over all times. But it is easy to be dominated just by very large values at just some times. Second, a single metric is usually incomprehensive in measuring performance. To make the ranking more comprehensive, multiple metrics are usually needed. But how to get a comprehensive unique rank from the ranks, possibly conflicting with each other? In this paper, we propose a framework to rank multiple nonlinear filters using ranking vectors and voting fusion based on a single metric or multiple metrics. Illustrative examples show that this framework is very effective.