This is kinda like an image processing toolbox.

During my time with EE663: Image Processing. I found that I have implemented a couple of image processing operations in Python (like convolutions for example), and later I found that I frequenctly return to some of its functions. Therefore, I want to save them here in GitHub.

The function that I return to the most is imshow. I am sure that I speak for everyone when I say that the defaults of matplotlib.pyplot.imshow leaves a LOT to be desired. For example:

• The default DPI is so freaking LOW which causes the output image to have terrible quality.
• The size of the image is so small that even a short title could be wider than the image. This is problematic when you have multiple subplots because their titles will overlap and cause a mess.
• Unless your image has a range from 0 to 1, you will have to convert the input image to uint8 so that plt.imshow "shows" the right range (by default, the range is from 0 to 1, but for uint8, it is from 0 to 255).
• For God knows why, grayscale image are shown with pseudo-color.
• Using cmap='gray' will show the normailzed image. Sometimes, this is not desirable.
• Images are shown with useless axes.

I could go on, but I guess you get the point now. Having to fix all of this every single time I use plt.imshow gets REALLY annoying after some time. As such, I decided to write what I would call a "convenience function", and it is imshow (will probably rename it to LazyImshow).

What this function does is very simple. It fixes all of the above issues swiftly for the most part.

Instead of writing:

plt.figure(dpi=300, figsize=(5.5,5.5))
plt.axis('off')
plt.title('Boo')
plt.imshow(np.uint8(Im*255), 'gray', vmin=0, vmax=255)

Now you only to need to type:

imshow(Im, 'title')

And the function will take care of the rest. It can take care of graysacle 2D or 3D images, RGB images, and it also works with tensors (though that's an experimental feature). It can do all that automatically, and it will also adjust the range of the image accordingly.

In the future, I plan to improve the function so that it give it a list of images and titles and it will arrange them according to my specific order. For example:

Images = [Im1, Im2, Im3, Im4]
titles = ['1', '2', '3', '4']
imshow(Image, title, grid=(2,2))

That would be really cool, because I will be able to change the size of the figure automatically depending on the grid size, and I believe that it should be fairly simple to do. However, I am not sure when will I implement those changes, but I will surely do them at one point of time.

Now, why the @$%! did I write all of this! I am genuinely interested if anyone managed to make it this far XD

I have implemented the above in the function imshow2.py, but keep in mind that the support is still experimental, so there is not much automation here, at least not yet.