Resize image with javascript canvas (smoothly)

Question

You can use down-stepping to achieve better results. Most browsers seem to use linear interpolation rather than bi-cubic when resizing images.

(Update There has been added a quality property to the specs, imageSmoothingQuality which is currently available in Chrome only.)

Unless one chooses no smoothing or nearest neighbor the browser will always interpolate the image after down-scaling it as this function as a low-pass filter to avoid aliasing.

Bi-linear uses 2x2 pixels to do the interpolation while bi-cubic uses 4x4 so by doing it in steps you can get close to bi-cubic result while using bi-linear interpolation as seen in the resulting images.

var canvas = document.getElementById("canvas");
var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
var img = new Image();

img.onload = function () {

    // set size proportional to image
    canvas.height = canvas.width * (img.height / img.width);

    // step 1 - resize to 50%
    var oc = document.createElement('canvas'),
        octx = oc.getContext('2d');

    oc.width = img.width * 0.5;
    oc.height = img.height * 0.5;
    octx.drawImage(img, 0, 0, oc.width, oc.height);

    // step 2
    octx.drawImage(oc, 0, 0, oc.width * 0.5, oc.height * 0.5);

    // step 3, resize to final size
    ctx.drawImage(oc, 0, 0, oc.width * 0.5, oc.height * 0.5,
    0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
}
img.src = "//i.imgur.com/SHo6Fub.jpg";

<img src="//i.imgur.com/SHo6Fub.jpg" width="300" height="234">
<canvas id="canvas" width=300></canvas>

Depending on how drastic your resize is you can might skip step 2 if the difference is less.

In the demo you can see the new result is now much similar to the image element.

Since Trung Le Nguyen Nhat's fiddle isn't correct at all (it just uses the original image in the last step)
I wrote my own general fiddle with performance comparison:

FIDDLE

Basically it's:

img.onload = function() {
   var canvas = document.createElement('canvas'),
       ctx = canvas.getContext("2d"),
       oc = document.createElement('canvas'),
       octx = oc.getContext('2d');

   canvas.width = width; // destination canvas size
   canvas.height = canvas.width * img.height / img.width;

   var cur = {
     width: Math.floor(img.width * 0.5),
     height: Math.floor(img.height * 0.5)
   }

   oc.width = cur.width;
   oc.height = cur.height;

   octx.drawImage(img, 0, 0, cur.width, cur.height);

   while (cur.width * 0.5 > width) {
     cur = {
       width: Math.floor(cur.width * 0.5),
       height: Math.floor(cur.height * 0.5)
     };
     octx.drawImage(oc, 0, 0, cur.width * 2, cur.height * 2, 0, 0, cur.width, cur.height);
   }

   ctx.drawImage(oc, 0, 0, cur.width, cur.height, 0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
}

I created a reusable Angular service to handle high quality resizing of images / canvases for anyone who's interested: https://gist.github.com/transitive-bullshit/37bac5e741eaec60e983

The service includes two solutions because they both have their own pros / cons. The lanczos convolution approach is higher quality at the cost of being slower, whereas the step-wise downscaling approach produces reasonably antialiased results and is significantly faster.

Example usage:

angular.module('demo').controller('ExampleCtrl', function (imageService) {
  // EXAMPLE USAGE
  // NOTE: it's bad practice to access the DOM inside a controller, 
  // but this is just to show the example usage.

  // resize by lanczos-sinc filter
  imageService.resize($('#myimg')[0], 256, 256)
    .then(function (resizedImage) {
      // do something with resized image
    })

  // resize by stepping down image size in increments of 2x
  imageService.resizeStep($('#myimg')[0], 256, 256)
    .then(function (resizedImage) {
      // do something with resized image
    })
})

While some of those code-snippets are short and working, they aren't trivial to follow and understand.

As i am not a fan of "copy-paste" from stack-overflow, i would like developers to understand the code they are push into they software, hope you'll find the below useful.

DEMO: Resizing images with JS and HTML Canvas Demo fiddler.

You may find 3 different methods to do this resize, that will help you understand how the code is working and why.

https://jsfiddle.net/1b68eLdr/93089/

Full code of both demo, and TypeScript method that you may want to use in your code, can be found in the GitHub project.

https://github.com/eyalc4/ts-image-resizer

This is the final code:

export class ImageTools {
base64ResizedImage: string = null;

constructor() {
}

ResizeImage(base64image: string, width: number = 1080, height: number = 1080) {
    let img = new Image();
    img.src = base64image;

    img.onload = () => {

        // Check if the image require resize at all
        if(img.height <= height && img.width <= width) {
            this.base64ResizedImage = base64image;

            // TODO: Call method to do something with the resize image
        }
        else {
            // Make sure the width and height preserve the original aspect ratio and adjust if needed
            if(img.height > img.width) {
                width = Math.floor(height * (img.width / img.height));
            }
            else {
                height = Math.floor(width * (img.height / img.width));
            }

            let resizingCanvas: HTMLCanvasElement = document.createElement('canvas');
            let resizingCanvasContext = resizingCanvas.getContext("2d");

            // Start with original image size
            resizingCanvas.width = img.width;
            resizingCanvas.height = img.height;


            // Draw the original image on the (temp) resizing canvas
            resizingCanvasContext.drawImage(img, 0, 0, resizingCanvas.width, resizingCanvas.height);

            let curImageDimensions = {
                width: Math.floor(img.width),
                height: Math.floor(img.height)
            };

            let halfImageDimensions = {
                width: null,
                height: null
            };

            // Quickly reduce the dize by 50% each time in few iterations until the size is less then
            // 2x time the target size - the motivation for it, is to reduce the aliasing that would have been
            // created with direct reduction of very big image to small image
            while (curImageDimensions.width * 0.5 > width) {
                // Reduce the resizing canvas by half and refresh the image
                halfImageDimensions.width = Math.floor(curImageDimensions.width * 0.5);
                halfImageDimensions.height = Math.floor(curImageDimensions.height * 0.5);

                resizingCanvasContext.drawImage(resizingCanvas, 0, 0, curImageDimensions.width, curImageDimensions.height,
                    0, 0, halfImageDimensions.width, halfImageDimensions.height);

                curImageDimensions.width = halfImageDimensions.width;
                curImageDimensions.height = halfImageDimensions.height;
            }

            // Now do final resize for the resizingCanvas to meet the dimension requirments
            // directly to the output canvas, that will output the final image
            let outputCanvas: HTMLCanvasElement = document.createElement('canvas');
            let outputCanvasContext = outputCanvas.getContext("2d");

            outputCanvas.width = width;
            outputCanvas.height = height;

            outputCanvasContext.drawImage(resizingCanvas, 0, 0, curImageDimensions.width, curImageDimensions.height,
                0, 0, width, height);

            // output the canvas pixels as an image. params: format, quality
            this.base64ResizedImage = outputCanvas.toDataURL('image/jpeg', 0.85);

            // TODO: Call method to do something with the resize image
        }
    };
}}

I don't understand why nobody is suggesting createImageBitmap.

createImageBitmap(
    document.getElementById('image'), 
    { resizeWidth: 300, resizeHeight: 234, resizeQuality: 'high' }
)
.then(imageBitmap => 
    document.getElementById('canvas').getContext('2d').drawImage(imageBitmap, 0, 0)
);

works beautifully (assuming you set ids for image and canvas).

I created a library that allows you to downstep any percentage while keeping all the color data.

https://github.com/danschumann/limby-resize/blob/master/lib/canvas_resize.js

That file you can include in the browser. The results will look like photoshop or image magick, preserving all the color data, averaging pixels, rather than taking nearby ones and dropping others. It doesn't use a formula to guess the averages, it takes the exact average.

Based on K3N answer, I rewrite code generally for anyone wants

var oc = document.createElement('canvas'), octx = oc.getContext('2d');
    oc.width = img.width;
    oc.height = img.height;
    octx.drawImage(img, 0, 0);
    while (oc.width * 0.5 > width) {
       oc.width *= 0.5;
       oc.height *= 0.5;
       octx.drawImage(oc, 0, 0, oc.width, oc.height);
    }
    oc.width = width;
    oc.height = oc.width * img.height / img.width;
    octx.drawImage(img, 0, 0, oc.width, oc.height);

UPDATE JSFIDDLE DEMO

Here is my ONLINE DEMO