Interpolating while displaying with Matplotlib imshow()

The imshow() function from Matplotlib provides many different types of interpolation methods to plot an image. These functions can be particularly useful when the image to be plotted is small. Let us use the small 50 x 50 lena image shown in the next figure to see the effects of plotting with different interpolation methods:

The next code block demonstrates how to use different interpolation methods with imshow():

im = mpimg.imread("../images/lena_small.jpg") # read the image from disk as a numpy ndarray
methods = ['none', 'nearest', 'bilinear', 'bicubic', 'spline16', 'lanczos']
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=3, figsize=(15, 30),
 subplot_kw={'xticks': [], 'yticks': []})
fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=0.05, wspace=0.05)
for ax, interp_method in zip(axes.flat, methods):
 ax.imshow(im, interpolation=interp_method)
 ax.set_title(str(interp_method), size=20)
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

The next figure shows the output of the preceding code: