An information measure of sensor performance and its relation to the ROC curve
Jörgen Ahlberg, Ingmar G. E. Renhorn, Niclas Wadströmer · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
The ROC curve is the most frequently used performance measure for detection methods and the underlying sensor configuration. Common problems are that the ROC curve does not present a single number that can be compared to other systems and that no discrimination between sensor performance and algorithm performance is done. To address the first problem, a number of measures are used in practice, like detection rate at a specific false alarm rate, or area-under-curve. For the second problem, we proposed in a previous paper1 an information theoretic method for measuring sensor performance. We now relate the method to the ROC curve, show that it is equivalent to selecting a certain point on the ROC curve, and that this point is easily determined. Our scope is hyperspectral data, studying discrimination between single pixels.