[SciPy-user] Getting coordinates of a level (contour) curve
Tue Aug 12 10:15:58 CDT 2008
It's straightforward to *estimate* the level curves of a function that
has been evaluated a regularly-spaced grid. (e.g. the "marching cubes"
algorithm and it's 2D antecedent, "marching squares".) I suspect that
this is what matplotlib is doing.
I can send a reasonably-fast C implementation of this for the 2D case
if anyone wants. (GPL or BSD, take your pick.)
Following a level curve from an arbitrary function is a bit harder. If
you have the function's gradient, you could in theory just go around
in a direction orthogonal to the gradient, but in the real world that
wouldn't work with numerical error and finite step sizes. You could
probably take steps orthogonal to the gradient, then correct back to
the desired level value by stepping along the gradient, and then
repeat until you get back near to where you started. This sounds like
far more trouble than it's worth, but if the function is very
expensive to evaluate, it might be cheaper and more accurate than
evaluating the function on a lattice and then estimating the level
curves from that...
On Aug 12, 2008, at 10:36 AM, Rob Clewley wrote:
>> Yes, you are right. But what if I have a mixture of gaussians, or any
>> other 2D probability density function?
> Indeed. Isn't the question about how to extract the data points for
> the curve from the 'contour' object in matplotlib, in the general
> case? Unfortunately I don't have the answer to that, but maybe
> introspection of the object would lead to an answer. From the API doc
> I see a mysterious attribute called 'level'.
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