A quiz on the broken biscuits experiment

Adrian F. Clark

1. How is a biscuit determined to be broken or unusable?

   • it has a large rectangularity
   • it has a large circularity
   • it cannot be segmented

   • it is not circular or rectangular

   There is no single way to do this but pretty much everyone identifies biscuits that are unbroken, and hence circular or rectangular. Other ones are then broken or unusable.

2. How do you make bikky.py iterate over the test set in biscuits.task?

   • edit the program
   • use -test on the command line
   • edit the task file

   • use -dataset test on the command-line

   The ability to work on different datasets in the task file is built into bikky.py: you use the -dataset qualifier with the name of the dataset to process.

3. What contour measure must be found for a rectangular biscuit?

   • oriented bounding box

   • convex hull
   • minimum enclosing circle
   • axis-aligned bounding box

   It makes sense to use the bounding box which is aligned with the edges of the biscuit rather than the edges of the image.

4. What is a sensible threshold on the circularity for a biscuit to be identified as circular?

   • $4\pi$

   • about 15

   • about 1
   • about 12.5

   The smallest possible value is $4\pi$ but the segmenter rarely produces a perfectly circular contour. Experience suggests that a limit of about 15 works on this dataset.

5. How many images contain broken or unusable biscuits?

   • 22

   • 219
   • 100
   • 6

   There are 22 images in the task file which are identified as "rej".

6. How many images are used for training in the task file?

   • 219
   • 100
   • 213

   • 6

   There are only 6 files for training specified in the task file.

7. What is a sensible threshold on the rectangularity for a biscuit to be identified as rectangular?

   • about $4\pi$

   • about 1.5

   • 1
   • 0

   Theory suggests that a threshold of about 1 should work but in practice it needs to be larger. About 1.5 works reasonably well.

8. What type of problem is this defined as in the task file?

   • classification

   • label

   • segmentation
   • biscuit

   The task file defines the problem as a 'label' one, meaning there is a single label to be determined for each image.

9. What is the purpose of this experiment?

   • to identify which biscuits are broken
   • to see how to segment images by colour

   • to see how a complete vision system works on real-world data

   • to use ways of describing shape

   Although all the answers are true to some extent, the REAL reason for this experiment is for you to learn that techniques which look as though they should work (like using circularity to identify circular regions) are normally much less neat than the theory would have you believe.

10. How are biscuits distinguished from the background in bikky.py?

    • by grey-scale

    • by shape
    • by colour in HSV space
    • by colour in RGB space

    The program segments foreground from background by thresholding. It might work better if we were to identify the background by colour and then invert the mask...