Compute IoU for Tracking | Dataford Interview Questions

Given a list of bounding boxes representing detected objects, write a function to calculate Intersection over Union (IoU) for tracking in Motional perception pipelines.

Implement calculate_iou(box_a, box_b), where each box is [x_min, y_min, x_max, y_max]. Return a floating-point IoU between 0.0 and 1.0. Treat boxes with zero or negative area, and boxes that do not overlap, as having an IoU of 0.0.

Input and Output

The function receives two lists of four numbers and returns a float. Use the standard definition: intersection_area / union_area, where union_area = area_a + area_b - intersection_area.

Constraints

Each input box contains exactly four finite numeric coordinates.
Coordinates may be negative.
Coordinates may be supplied in either corner order.
The function returns a floating-point value in the range [0.0, 1.0].

Function Signature

def calculate_iou(box_a, box_b):

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