Removing duplicate columns and rows from a NumPy 2D array

This should do the trick:

def unique_rows(a):
    a = np.ascontiguousarray(a)
    unique_a = np.unique(a.view([('', a.dtype)]*a.shape[1]))
    return unique_a.view(a.dtype).reshape((unique_a.shape[0], a.shape[1]))

Example:

>>> a = np.array([[1, 1], [2, 3], [1, 1], [5, 4], [2, 3]])
>>> unique_rows(a)
array([[1, 1],
       [2, 3],
       [5, 4]])