Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
It is often helpful to compute the intrinsic volumes of a set of which only a pixel image is observed. A computationally efficient approach, which is suggested by several authors and used in practice, is to approximate the intrinsic volumes by linear combinations of the pixel configuration counts. However, we will show that when this approach is used for the computation of an intrinsic volume other than volume or surface area, an asymptotic error of 100% of the correct value cannot be avoided. As a consequence we derive that estimators which ignore the data and return constant values are optimal with respect to a natural criterion which has already been applied successfully for the estimation of the surface area.