Calculating percentage of Bounding box overlap, for image detector evaluation

Question

In testing an object detection algorithm in large images, we check our detected bounding boxes against the coordinates given for the ground truth rectangles.

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Answer 1

For axis-aligned bounding boxes it is relatively simple. "Axis-aligned" means that the bounding box isn't rotated; or in other words that the boxes lines are parallel to the axes. Here's how to calculate the IoU of two axis-aligned bounding boxes.

def get_iou(bb1, bb2):
    """
    Calculate the Intersection over Union (IoU) of two bounding boxes.

    Parameters
    ----------
    bb1 : dict
        Keys: {'x1', 'x2', 'y1', 'y2'}
        The (x1, y1) position is at the top left corner,
        the (x2, y2) position is at the bottom right corner
    bb2 : dict
        Keys: {'x1', 'x2', 'y1', 'y2'}
        The (x, y) position is at the top left corner,
        the (x2, y2) position is at the bottom right corner

    Returns
    -------
    float
        in [0, 1]
    """
    assert bb1['x1'] < bb1['x2']
    assert bb1['y1'] < bb1['y2']
    assert bb2['x1'] < bb2['x2']
    assert bb2['y1'] < bb2['y2']

    # determine the coordinates of the intersection rectangle
    x_left = max(bb1['x1'], bb2['x1'])
    y_top = max(bb1['y1'], bb2['y1'])
    x_right = min(bb1['x2'], bb2['x2'])
    y_bottom = min(bb1['y2'], bb2['y2'])

    if x_right < x_left or y_bottom < y_top:
        return 0.0

    # The intersection of two axis-aligned bounding boxes is always an
    # axis-aligned bounding box
    intersection_area = (x_right - x_left) * (y_bottom - y_top)

    # compute the area of both AABBs
    bb1_area = (bb1['x2'] - bb1['x1']) * (bb1['y2'] - bb1['y1'])
    bb2_area = (bb2['x2'] - bb2['x1']) * (bb2['y2'] - bb2['y1'])

    # compute the intersection over union by taking the intersection
    # area and dividing it by the sum of prediction + ground-truth
    # areas - the interesection area
    iou = intersection_area / float(bb1_area + bb2_area - intersection_area)
    assert iou >= 0.0
    assert iou <= 1.0
    return iou

Explanation

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