Resizing an image in an HTML5 canvas

Question

I\'m trying to create a thumbnail image on the client side using javascript and a canvas element, but when I shrink the image down, it looks terrible. It looks as if it was

Answer 1

The problem with some of this solutions is that they access directly the pixel data and loop through it to perform the downsampling. Depending on the size of the image this can be very resource intensive, and it would be better to use the browser's internal algorithms.

The drawImage() function is using a linear-interpolation, nearest-neighbor resampling method. That works well when you are not resizing down more than half the original size.

If you loop to only resize max one half at a time, the results would be quite good, and much faster than accessing pixel data.

This function downsample to half at a time until reaching the desired size:

  function resize_image( src, dst, type, quality ) {
     var tmp = new Image(),
         canvas, context, cW, cH;

     type = type || 'image/jpeg';
     quality = quality || 0.92;

     cW = src.naturalWidth;
     cH = src.naturalHeight;

     tmp.src = src.src;
     tmp.onload = function() {

        canvas = document.createElement( 'canvas' );

        cW /= 2;
        cH /= 2;

        if ( cW < src.width ) cW = src.width;
        if ( cH < src.height ) cH = src.height;

        canvas.width = cW;
        canvas.height = cH;
        context = canvas.getContext( '2d' );
        context.drawImage( tmp, 0, 0, cW, cH );

        dst.src = canvas.toDataURL( type, quality );

        if ( cW <= src.width || cH <= src.height )
           return;

        tmp.src = dst.src;
     }

  }
  // The images sent as parameters can be in the DOM or be image objects
  resize_image( $( '#original' )[0], $( '#smaller' )[0] );

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