Using For loop on nested list - list

Question

I'm using a nested list to hold data in a Cartesian coordinate type system.
The data is a list of categories which could be 0,1,2,3,4,5,255 (just 7 categories).
The data is held in a list formatted thus:
stack = [[0,1,0,0],
[2,1,0,0],
[1,1,1,3]]
Each list represents a row and each element of a row represents a data point.
I'm keen to hang on to this format because I am using it to generate images and thus far it has been extremely easy to use.
However, I have run into problems running the following code:
for j in range(len(stack)):
stack[j].append(255)
stack[j].insert(0, 255)
This is intended to iterate through each row adding a single element 255 to the start and end of each row. Unfortunately it adds 12 instances of 255 to both the start and end!
This makes no sense to me. Presumably I am missing something very trivial but I can't see what it might be. As far as I can tell it is related to the loop: if I write stack[0].append(255) outside of the loop it behaves normally.
The code is obviously part of a much larger script. The script runs multiple For loops, a couple of which are range(12) but which should have closed by the time this loop is called.
So - am I missing something trivial or is it more nefarious than that?
Edit: full code
step_size = 12, the code above is the part that inserts "right and left borders"
def classify(target_file, output_file):
import numpy
import cifar10_eval # want to hijack functions from the evaluation script
target_folder = "Binaries/" # finds target file in "Binaries"
destination_folder = "Binaries/Maps/" # destination for output file
# open the meta file to retrieve x,y dimensions
file = open(target_folder + target_file + "_meta" + ".txt", "r")
new_x = int(file.readline())
new_y = int(file.readline())
orig_x = int(file.readline())
orig_y = int(file.readline())
segment_dimension = int(file.readline())
step_size = int(file.readline())
file.close()
# run cifar10_eval and create predictions vector (formatted as a list)
predictions = cifar10_eval.map_interface(new_x * new_y)
del predictions[(new_x * new_y):] # get rid of excess predictions (that are an artefact of the fixed batch size)
print("# of predictions: " + str(len(predictions)))
# check that we are mapping the whole picture! (evaluation functions don't necessarily use the full data set)
if len(predictions) != new_x * new_y:
print("Error: number of predictions from cifar10_eval does not match metadata for this file")
return
# copy predictions to a nested list to make extraction of x/y data easy
# also eliminates need to keep metadata - x/y dimensions are stored via the shape of the output vector
stack = []
for j in range(new_y):
stack.append([])
for i in range(new_x):
stack[j].append(predictions[j*new_x + i])
predictions = None # clear the variable to free up memory
# iterate through map list and explode each category to cover more pixels
# assigns a step_size x step_size area to each classification input to achieve correspondance with original image
new_stack = []
for j in range(len(stack)):
row = stack[j]
new_row = []
for i in range(len(row)):
for a in range(step_size):
new_row.append(row[i])
for b in range(step_size):
new_stack.append(new_row)
stack = new_stack
new_stack = None
new_row = None # clear the variables to free up memory
# add a border to the image to indicate that some information has been lost
# border also ensures that map has 1-1 correspondance with original image which makes processing easier
# calculate border dimensions
top_and_left_thickness = int((segment_dimension - step_size) / 2)
right_thickness = int(top_and_left_thickness + (orig_x - (top_and_left_thickness * 2 + step_size * new_x)))
bottom_thickness = int(top_and_left_thickness + (orig_y - (top_and_left_thickness * 2 + step_size * new_y)))
print(top_and_left_thickness)
print(right_thickness)
print(bottom_thickness)
print(len(stack[0]))
# add the right then left borders
for j in range(len(stack)):
for b in range(right_thickness):
stack[j].append(255)
for b in range(top_and_left_thickness):
stack[j].insert(0, 255)
print(stack[0])
print(len(stack[0]))
# add the top and bottom borders
row = []
for i in range(len(stack[0])):
row.append(255) # create a blank row
for b in range(top_and_left_thickness):
stack.insert(0, row) # append the blank row to the top x many times
for b in range(bottom_thickness):
stack.append(row) # append the blank row to the bottom of the map
# we have our final output
# repackage this as a numpy array and save for later use
output = numpy.asarray(stack,numpy.uint8)
numpy.save(destination_folder + output_file + ".npy", output)
print("Category mapping complete, map saved as numpy pickle: " + output_file + ".npy")