Put an Image Behind your matplotlib plots

Here’s a quick one.

Problem.

You want to add pretty graphics in the back of your data. How to do this with matplotlib?

Solution

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Path to the image
fpath =r"C:\Users\sukhbinder.singh\Desktop\day.jpg"

# Read the image
img = plt.imread(fpath)

# Plot the image
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.imshow(img)
a, b, c,d = plt.axis('off')

# Now plot your appropriatly scalled data. We will plot some 
# random numbers
xx = np.random.randint(a,b, size=100)
yy = np.random.randint(d,c, size=100)
plt.plot(xx,yy, "r.")
plt.savefig("wall.png")
plt.show()

Simple. Here’s the result

Image as Background in a Matplotlib Plot