Align Images Using Matplotlib's ImageGrid

Introduction

In this tutorial, we will learn how to use ImageGrid from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1 in Matplotlib to align multiple images of different sizes.

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Import the necessary libraries

First, we need to import the necessary libraries including Matplotlib, cbook and ImageGrid.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import cbook
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1 import ImageGrid

Create a Figure and ImageGrid

Next, we create a figure and ImageGrid with nrows_ncols parameter to define the number of rows and columns of the grid.

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(5.5, 3.5))
grid = ImageGrid(fig, 111,  ## similar to subplot(111)
                 nrows_ncols=(1, 3),
                 axes_pad=0.1,
                 label_mode="L")

Load the image data

We will use an example image data called bivariate_normal.npy from cbook to demonstrate the ImageGrid. We load the image data using get_sample_data function from cbook.

Z = cbook.get_sample_data("axes_grid/bivariate_normal.npy")
im1 = Z
im2 = Z[:, :10]
im3 = Z[:, 10:]
vmin, vmax = Z.min(), Z.max()

Display images in the ImageGrid

Finally, we display the images in the ImageGrid using imshow function and zip function to iterate through the axes in the grid.

for ax, im in zip(grid, [im1, im2, im3]):
    ax.imshow(im, origin="lower", vmin=vmin, vmax=vmax)

plt.show()

Summary

In this tutorial, we have learned how to use ImageGrid in Matplotlib to align multiple images of different sizes. We first import the necessary libraries, then create a figure and ImageGrid, load the image data, and finally display the images in the ImageGrid.