What’s the fastest way of checking if a point is inside a polygon in python

You can consider shapely:

from shapely.geometry import Point
from shapely.geometry.polygon import Polygon

point = Point(0.5, 0.5)
polygon = Polygon([(0, 0), (0, 1), (1, 1), (1, 0)])
print(polygon.contains(point))

From the methods you’ve mentioned I’ve only used the second, path.contains_points, and it works fine. In any case depending on the precision you need for your test I would suggest creating a numpy bool grid with all nodes inside the polygon to be True (False if not). If you are going to make a test for a lot of points this might be faster (although notice this relies you are making a test within a “pixel” tolerance):

from matplotlib import path
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

first = -3
size  = (3-first)/100
xv,yv = np.meshgrid(np.linspace(-3,3,100),np.linspace(-3,3,100))
p = path.Path([(0,0), (0, 1), (1, 1), (1, 0)])  # square with legs length 1 and bottom left corner at the origin
flags = p.contains_points(np.hstack((xv.flatten()[:,np.newaxis],yv.flatten()[:,np.newaxis])))
grid = np.zeros((101,101),dtype="bool")
grid[((xv.flatten()-first)/size).astype('int'),((yv.flatten()-first)/size).astype('int')] = flags

xi,yi = np.random.randint(-300,300,100)/100,np.random.randint(-300,300,100)/100
vflag = grid[((xi-first)/size).astype('int'),((yi-first)/size).astype('int')]
plt.imshow(grid.T,origin='lower',interpolation='nearest',cmap='binary')
plt.scatter(((xi-first)/size).astype('int'),((yi-first)/size).astype('int'),c=vflag,cmap='Greens',s=90)
plt.show()

, the results is this: