How do I interpolate a 2D gridded point cloud to a continuous area?

Question

I have a 2 dimensional Numpy NDarray filled with floats between 0 and about 8. This 2 dimensional arrays size is (1000, 1600) and there are about 1400 values, (the points in the point cloud), the remaining values are None, so matplotlib does not plot these values. You can see the plotted table in the image below. What I'd like to have is, the None-values interpolated with the values next to it to have a gradientlike heatmap. This pointcloud represents the shape of a roof and I want to process this data to an image I can give into a neural network to detect the type of roof.

The code I used for this plot is pretty short,

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.clf()
#plotGrid is the numpy.ndarray with shape (1000, 1600) and dtype float
plt.imshow(plotGrid, cmap='gray', interpolation='nearest')
plt.colorbar()
plt.show()

Image (click to enlarge and see points):

Answer 1

tricontourf

You might use a tricontour / tricontourf plot of the valid values. To this end, you first need to filter out all nan values (you should indeed make the invalid values np.nan instead of None). Those values, together with their coordinates can be put into plt.tricontourf() to obtain a contour plot without the need of manual interpolation.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

# Generate some example data
f = lambda x,y : np.exp((-(x-150)**2-(y-150)**2)/3.e3)
plotGrid = np.zeros((300,300))*np.nan
coo = np.random.randint(5,295, size=(150,2) )
for x,y in coo:
    plotGrid[y,x] = f(x,y)
#plotGrid is now a numpy.ndarray with shape (300,300), mostly np.nan, and dtype float

# filter out nan values and get coordinates.
x,y = np.indices(plotGrid.shape)
x,y,z = x[~np.isnan(plotGrid)], y[~np.isnan(plotGrid)], plotGrid[~np.isnan(plotGrid)]

plt.tricontourf(x,y,z)

plt.colorbar()
plt.show()

tripcolor

Using tripcolor is another option then:

plt.tripcolor(x,y,z, shading='gouraud')

interpolate and contourf

You can also interpolate the data on a grid first, using matplotlib.mlab.griddata, and then either use a normal contourf plot,

xi = np.linspace(0, plotGrid.shape[1], plotGrid.shape[1])
yi = np.linspace(0, plotGrid.shape[0], plotGrid.shape[0])
zi = mlab.griddata(x, y, z, xi, yi, interp='linear')
plt.contourf(xi, yi, zi, 15)

interpolate and imshow

Or in the same manner use an imshow plot,

plt.imshow(zi)