I am perplexed by the API to scipy.ndimage.interpolation.affine_transform. And judging by this issue I'm not the only one. I'm actually wanting to do more interesting things with affine_transform than just rotating an image, but a rotation would do for starters. (And yes I'm well aware of scipy.ndimage.interpolation.rotate, but figuring out how to drive affine_transform is what interests me here).

When I want to do this sort of thing in systems like OpenGL, I'm think in terms of computing the transform which applies a 2x2 rotation matrix R about a centre c, and therefore thinking of points p being transformed (p-c)R+c = pR+c-cR, which gives a c-cR term to be used as the translation component of a transform. However, according to the issue above, scipy's affine_transform does "offset first" so we actually need to compute an offset s such that (p-c)R+c=(p+s)R which with a bit of rearrangement gives s=(c-cR)R' where R' is the inverse of R.

If I plug this into an ipython notebook (pylab mode; code below maybe needs some additional imports):

img=scipy.misc.lena()
#imshow(img,cmap=cm.gray);show()
centre=0.5*array(img.shape)
a=15.0*pi/180.0
rot=array([[cos(a),sin(a)],[-sin(a),cos(a)]])
offset=(centre-centre.dot(rot)).dot(linalg.inv(rot))
rotimg=scipy.ndimage.interpolation.affine_transform(
    img,rot,order=2,offset=offset,cval=0.0,output=float32
)
imshow(rotimg,cmap=cm.gray);show()

I get

which unfortunately isn't rotated about the centre.

So what's the trick I'm missing here?

Just doing some quick & dirty testing I noticed that taking the negative value of your offset seems to rotate about the centre.