Reprojecting polar to cartesian grid

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!

OpenCV 3.4 can do this now pretty easily with warpPolar()

Very simple to call:

import numpy as np
import cv2
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

# Read in our image from disk
image = cv2.imread('washington_quarter.png',0)
plt.imshow(image),plt.show()

margin = 0.9 # Cut off the outer 10% of the image
# Do the polar rotation along 1024 angular steps with a radius of 256 pixels.
polar_img = cv2.warpPolar(image, (256, 1024), (image.shape[0]/2,image.shape[1]/2), image.shape[1]*margin*0.5, cv2.WARP_POLAR_LINEAR)
# Rotate it sideways to be more visually pleasing
polar_img = cv2.rotate(polar_img, cv2.ROTATE_90_COUNTERCLOCKWISE)
plt.imshow(polar_img),plt.show()

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.