Resize image with javascript canvas (smoothly)

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);
}