Optimal fault-tolerant signal detection

G.G.L. Meyer and H.L. Weinert (see ibid., vol.ASSP-34, p.973-8, Aug. 1986) use the majority rule for fault-tolerant detection. The authors extend this and examine a redundant system with a general voting rule. They present an optimal design for each individual processor and the optimal selection of the k-out-of-M voting rule. They give an analytic solution to the optimal voting policy for the special case of low false alarm rate, with arbitrary failure probabilities and receiver operating characteristics (ROCs). Performance is improved significantly by using the optimal voting rule instead of the majority voting rule, especially in the tail regions of the ROC