A quiz on the broken biscuits experiment

Adrian F. Clark

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

   • about 12.5
   • about 1

   • about 15

   • $4\pi$

   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.

2. What is the purpose of this experiment?

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

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

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

   • classification
   • segmentation
   • biscuit

   • label

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

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

   • axis-aligned bounding box
   • convex hull

   • oriented bounding box

   • minimum enclosing circle

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

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

   • 6

   • 213
   • 100
   • 219

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

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

   • it has a large circularity
   • it has a large rectangularity
   • 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.

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

   • use -test on the command line

   • use -dataset test on the command-line

   • edit the task file
   • edit the program

   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.

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

   • 1

   • about 1.5

   • 0
   • about $4\pi$

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

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

   • by grey-scale

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

10. How many images contain broken or unusable biscuits?

    • 22

    • 6
    • 219
    • 100

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