Better image downscale with canvas (demo)

This function downscales images in the browser, producing a better quality result, than the traditional CanvasRenderingContext2D.scale() method. It neutralises the "fuzzy" look caused by the native canvas downsampling, when processing relatively large images like photos taken with a smartphone. Check the demo page.

Motivation

While other image resizing libraries are based on complex interpolation algorithms such as Lanczos resampling, image downscaling usually doesn't require that complexity, because there is no interpolation happening (in other words we don't create new pixels).

On the other hand, browsers implement very fast HTMLCanvasElement downsampling, when the pixel from source position is directly transfered to the destination position, loosing all the neighbouring pixels information. The resulting image may often look very noisy.

To resolve this problem, the proposed function does a simple area-average downsampling, producing preferable results with relatively small processing time.

Performance

This function uses the technique, proposed by Paul Rouget in his article about pixel manipulation with Typed Arrays. His method reduces the number of read/write operations to the ArrayBuffer of the ImageData returned by the CanvasRenderingContext2D.getImageData() method. This saves overall processing time when you want to iterate through every pixel of the source image.

Also, the usage of Math.round() method is avoided in favour of Bitwise operators, giving a significant boost in performance in some browsers.

Image cropping

Image cropping is very often used in pair with resizing, but both can be very naturally combined. As we don't need to iterate through pixels in cropped areas, the function does both downscaling and cropping in range of the same processing loop. This saves some memory and processing time.

By default, the source image is cropped in the way, that the center of the source image is transfered to the resulting image.

Rollback to canvas resizing

The function also uses basic canvas resizing method when the scale factor of the resulting image is greater than 0.5x. So the better downscaling happen only when the resulting image is at least 2 times smaller than the initial image. In other cases basic canvas resizing gives better image quality result.

Install

npm install downscale

Syntax

Promise<DOMString> downscale(source, width, height[, options]);

Parameters

Return value

A Promise that resolves to a DOMString containing the resulting image in data URI format.

Examples

Send image data with <form>

This is just a simple code snippet which uses the form file input as a source of the image data.

HTML

<input type="file" accept="image/*" onchange="filesChanged(this.files)" multiple />
<form method="post"><input type="submit"/></form>

Javascript

function filesChanged(files)
{
  for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) {
    downscale(files[i], 400, 400).
    then(function(dataURL) {
      var destInput = document.createElement("input");
      destInput.type = "hidden";
      destInput.name = "image[]";
      destInput.value = dataURL;
      // Append image to form as hidden input
      document.forms[0].appendChild(destInput);
      // Preview image
      var destImg = document.createElement("img");
      destImg.src = dataURL;
      document.body.appendChild(destImg);
    })
  }
}

Send image data with FormData

You can use even cleaner FormData interface to send pure blob data to the server.

HTML

<input type="file" accept="image/*" onchange="filesChanged(this.files)" multiple />
<button onclick="submitForm()">Submit form data</button>

<div id="previews"></div>

Javascript

var formData = new FormData();
var URL = window.URL || window.webkitURL;

function filesChanged(files)
{
  for (let i = 0; i < files.length; i++) {
    downscale(files[i], 400, 400, {returnBlob: 1}).
    then(function(blob) {
      // Append image to form as a blob data
      formData.append("userpic[]", blob, files[i].name);
      // Preview image
      var destImg = document.createElement("img");
      destImg.src = URL.createObjectURL(blob);
      document.body.appendChild(destImg);
    })
  }
}

function submitForm()
{
  var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
  request.open("POST", "http://foo.com/submitform.php");
  request.send(formData);
}

Resize <img> element

Processing an <img> element is quite simple. The function will wait for image load, so you don't have to worry about it.

HTML

<img id="source" src="../public/1.jpg" />

Javascript

var sourceImg = document.getElementById('source');

downscale(sourceImg, 400, 400).
then(function(dataURL) {
  var destImg = document.createElement('img');
  destImg.src = dataURL;
  document.body.appendChild(destImg);
})

Load image from URL

The function can upload the source image from the given URL with no extra code needed. Keep in mind that the image should share origin with the code file.

var imageURL = "/public/1.jpg";

downscale(imageURL, 400, 400).
then(function(dataURL) {
  var destImg = document.createElement('img');
  destImg.src = dataURL;
  document.body.appendChild(destImg);
})

Other libraries

Check out other great in-browser image resizing libraries:

• pica is great image resizing tool with support of WebWorkers and WebAssembly from the box
• Hermite-resize does image resize/resample using Hermite filter and WebWorkers

License

MIT