Clipping Images with Patches

Introduction

In this lab, we will learn how to clip an image with patches using Python's Matplotlib library. Clipping an image with patches allows you to highlight specific areas of the image, or crop the image to a specific shape.

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Skills Graph

Import Libraries

To get started, we need to import the necessary libraries. We will be using Matplotlib to display the image and create the patch, and the cbook library to load the sample image.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.cbook as cbook
import matplotlib.patches as patches

Load the Image

We will use the get_sample_data method from cbook to load a sample image. This method returns a file-like object, which we can pass to imshow to display the image.

with cbook.get_sample_data('grace_hopper.jpg') as image_file:
    image = plt.imread(image_file)

Display the Image

Now we can display the image using Matplotlib's imshow method. We will also turn off the axis so that we only see the image.

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
im = ax.imshow(image)
ax.axis('off')

Create the Patch

To create the patch, we will use Matplotlib's patches module. We will create a circular patch with a radius of 200 pixels, centered at the point (260, 200).

patch = patches.Circle((260, 200), radius=200, transform=ax.transData)

Clip the Image

Finally, we will clip the image using the set_clip_path method of the image. This method takes the patch as an argument and clips the image to the shape of the patch.

im.set_clip_path(patch)

Display the Clipped Image

We can now display the clipped image using Matplotlib's show method.

plt.show()

Summary

In this lab, we learned how to clip an image with patches using Python's Matplotlib library. We loaded a sample image, created a circular patch, and clipped the image to the shape of the patch. Clipping images with patches can be useful for highlighting specific areas of an image or cropping the image to a specific shape.