ProgrammingPython

An Introduction to Matplotlib

Matplotlib, Python

Matplotlib is a plotting library. In this section give a brief introduction to the matplotlib.pyplot module, which provides a plotting system similar to that of MATLAB.

Plotting

The most important function in matplotlib is plot, which allows you to plot 2D data. Here is a simple example:

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import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Compute the x and y coordinates for points on a sine curve
x = np.arange(0, 3 * np.pi, 0.1)
y = np.sin(x)

# Plot the points using matplotlib
plt.plot(x, y)
plt.show()  # You must call plt.show() to make graphics appear.

Running this code produces the following plot:

With just a little bit of extra work we can easily plot multiple lines at once, and add a title, legend, and axis labels:

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import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Compute the x and y coordinates for points on sine and cosine curves
x = np.arange(0, 3 * np.pi, 0.1)
y_sin = np.sin(x)
y_cos = np.cos(x)

# Plot the points using matplotlib
plt.plot(x, y_sin)
plt.plot(x, y_cos)
plt.xlabel('x axis label')
plt.ylabel('y axis label')
plt.title('Sine and Cosine')
plt.legend(['Sine', 'Cosine'])
plt.show()

_More details about plot function in this document._

Subplots

You can plot different things in the same figure using the subplot function. Here is an example:

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import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Compute the x and y coordinates for points on sine and cosine curves
x = np.arange(0, 3 * np.pi, 0.1)
y_sin = np.sin(x)
y_cos = np.cos(x)

# Set up a subplot grid that has height 2 and width 1,
# and set the first such subplot as active.
plt.subplot(2, 1, 1)

# Make the first plot
plt.plot(x, y_sin)
plt.title('Sine')

# Set the second subplot as active, and make the second plot.
plt.subplot(2, 1, 2)
plt.plot(x, y_cos)
plt.title('Cosine')

# Show the figure.
plt.show()

_More details about plot function in this document._

Images

You can use the imshow function to show images. Here is an example:

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import numpy as np
from scipy.misc import imread, imresize
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

img = imread('assets/cat.jpg')
img_tinted = img * [1, 0.95, 0.9]

# Show the original image
plt.subplot(1, 2, 1)
plt.imshow(img)

# Show the tinted image
plt.subplot(1, 2, 2)

# A slight gotcha with imshow is that it might give strange results
# if presented with data that is not uint8. To work around this, we
# explicitly cast the image to uint8 before displaying it.
plt.imshow(np.uint8(img_tinted))
plt.show()

Reference

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