I have some grayscale image data (0-255). Depending on the NumPy dtype, I am getting different dot product results. For example, x0 and x1 are the same image:
>>> x0
array([0, 0, 0, ..., 0, 0, 0], dtype=uint8)
>>> x1
array([0, 0, 0, ..., 0, 0, 0], dtype=uint8)
>>> (x0 == x1).all()
True
>>> np.dot(x0, x1)
133
>>> np.dot(x0.astype(np.float64), x1.astype(np.float64))
6750341.0
I know the second dot product is correct because, since they are the same image, the cosine distance should be 0:
>>> from scipy.spatial import distance
>>> distance.cosine(x0, x1)
0.99998029729164795
>>> distance.cosine(x0.astype(np.float64), x1.astype(np.float64))
0.0
Of course, dot product should work for integers. And for small arrays, it does:
>>> v = np.array([1,2,3], dtype=np.uint8)
>>> v
array([1, 2, 3], dtype=uint8)
>>> np.dot(v, v)
14
>>> np.dot(v.astype(np.float64), v.astype(np.float64))
14.0
>>> distance.cosine(v, v)
0.0
What's happening. Why is the dot product giving me different answers depending on dtype?