Reprojecting polar to cartesian grid

Question

I have a polar (r,theta) grid (which means that each cell is an annulus section) containing values of some physical quantity (e.g. temperature), and I would like to re-grid (or re-project) these values onto a cartesian grid. Are there any Python packages that can do this?

I am not interested in converting the coordinates of the centers of the cells from polar to cartesian - this is very easy. Instead, I'm looking for a package that can actually re-grid the data properly.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Answer 1

Not a python programmer, can't suggest a package.

This is a non-trivial problem because there is not a one to one correspondence.

If you must code it yourself, and if you don't mind introducing a little blurring, you could map each rectangular cell back to the polar plane and form an appropriately weighted average over the values in the polar cells.

But even this is not easy, because identifying the cells you have to average over and getting the weights will require careful consideration. I think that it is easy enough to find the angular limits because hose always project through on of the corners (exception: any rectangular cell than encompasses the origin lives in the whole angular range). But the inner radial limit may lie on an edge of a rectangular cell rather than on a vertex.

Good luck.

Answer 2

Thanks for your answers - after thinking a bit more about this I came up with the following code:

import numpy as np

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('Agg')
import matplotlib.pyplot as mpl

from scipy.interpolate import interp1d
from scipy.ndimage import map_coordinates


def polar2cartesian(r, t, grid, x, y, order=3):

    X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, y)

    new_r = np.sqrt(X*X+Y*Y)
    new_t = np.arctan2(X, Y)

    ir = interp1d(r, np.arange(len(r)), bounds_error=False)
    it = interp1d(t, np.arange(len(t)))

    new_ir = ir(new_r.ravel())
    new_it = it(new_t.ravel())

    new_ir[new_r.ravel() > r.max()] = len(r)-1
    new_ir[new_r.ravel() < r.min()] = 0

    return map_coordinates(grid, np.array([new_ir, new_it]),
                            order=order).reshape(new_r.shape)

# Define original polar grid

nr = 10
nt = 10

r = np.linspace(1, 100, nr)
t = np.linspace(0., np.pi, nt)
z = np.random.random((nr, nt))

# Define new cartesian grid

nx = 100
ny = 200

x = np.linspace(0., 100., nx)
y = np.linspace(-100., 100., ny)

# Interpolate polar grid to cartesian grid (nearest neighbor)

fig = mpl.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.imshow(polar2cartesian(r, t, z, x, y, order=0), interpolation='nearest')
fig.savefig('test1.png')

# Interpolate polar grid to cartesian grid (cubic spline)

fig = mpl.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.imshow(polar2cartesian(r, t, z, x, y, order=3), interpolation='nearest')
fig.savefig('test2.png')

Which is not strictly re-gridding, but works fine for what I need. Just posting the code in case it is useful to anyone else. Feel free to suggest improvements!

Answer 3

You can do this more compactly with scipy.ndimage.geometric_transform. Here is some sample code:

import numpy as N
import scipy as S
import scipy.ndimage

temperature = <whatever> 
# This is the data in your polar grid.
# The 0th and 1st axes correspond to r and θ, respectively.
# For the sake of simplicity, θ goes from 0 to 2π, 
# and r's units are just its indices.

def polar2cartesian(outcoords, inputshape, origin):
    """Coordinate transform for converting a polar array to Cartesian coordinates. 
    inputshape is a tuple containing the shape of the polar array. origin is a
    tuple containing the x and y indices of where the origin should be in the
    output array."""

    xindex, yindex = outcoords
    x0, y0 = origin
    x = xindex - x0
    y = yindex - y0

    r = N.sqrt(x**2 + y**2)
    theta = N.arctan2(y, x)
    theta_index = N.round((theta + N.pi) * inputshape[1] / (2 * N.pi))

    return (r,theta_index)

temperature_cartesian = S.ndimage.geometric_transform(temperature, polar2cartesian, 
    order=0,
    output_shape = (temperature.shape[0] * 2, temperature.shape[0] * 2),
    extra_keywords = {'inputshape':temperature.shape,
        'center':(temperature.shape[0], temperature.shape[0])})

You can change order=0 as desired for better interpolation. The output array temperature_cartesian is 2r by 2r here, but you can specify any size and origin you like.