Polar Plotting

[gawebb-dstl]

Create polar plots using plotly like this

[mharris-dstl]

I've pushed some grammar changes (thought it was easier for everyone if I add them myself and put them in as one) but have some other thoughts for the example.

• It needs a cover image putting in.
• It probably needs to show tracks being plotted, since currently the example shows only ground truth and detections but there is functionality in the source code for track plotting.
• The polar plots themselves could do with some more description in the titles. While polar plots look really cool, I personally have to concentrate quite hard to understand the information they're showing. Better descriptions would help a lot with that.
• The scenario has 2 targets in 3D moving in all 3 dimensions, but the static plot only shows 2 dimensions.
• Could potentially get a 2D animated plotter in there as well? I tried to add this but it hasn't got functionality to automatically plot moving platforms. But an animation of some sort would give a lot of intuition as to how the targets are moving.

[gawebb-dstl]

• It needs a cover image putting in.

I think this will be done automatically by read the docs

• It probably needs to show tracks being plotted, since currently the example shows only ground truth and detections but there is functionality in the source code for track plotting.

There is PR in the pipeline to do tracking in angular state space. That will give us angle tracks. In that PR I'll update this example.

• The polar plots themselves could do with some more description in the titles. While polar plots look really cool, I personally have to concentrate quite hard to understand the information they're showing. Better descriptions would help a lot with that.

Agreed. I'll update the branch with that

• The scenario has 2 targets in 3D moving in all 3 dimensions, but the static plot only shows 2 dimensions.

I'll update the example to put the scenario in 2D

• Could potentially get a 2D animated plotter in there as well? I tried to add this but it hasn't got functionality to automatically plot moving platforms. But an animation of some sort would give a lot of intuition as to how the targets are moving.

I may look into this for a later PR

[sdhiscocks]

Is this used?

[gawebb-dstl]

Yes, I believe it is needed to plot angles when using Plotly

[sdhiscocks]

Would it be possible to use float() or .dtype(np.float_) in plotting calls instead?

[gawebb-dstl]

You could but you would have to repeat that code in every plot_### function in the Plottery and PolarPlotterly classes. Plotting Angle types using Plotly fails on my machine without it. The to_plotly_json function isn't called directly anywhere in stone-soup but it is called by the plotly package.

[gawebb-dstl]

The default function in plotly/_plotly_utils/utils.py tries to convert Angle types but fails currently. We could try and edit the Angle class so it is picked up by one of the other encode methods but this would probably raise other implications.

Link to default function code

[sdhiscocks]

Ah, I see. I'll merge now.

Thanks for link to the code. Looks like Plotly does have encode for Decimal type, but not for Real or other numbers, which would be useful to add. I may raise an issue with them.