I am a bit puzzled by the rendering of google tiles with Cartopy. The map looks extremely poor compared to the standard google map look.
Example (code from https://ocefpaf.github.io/python4oceanographers/blog/2015/06/22/osm/):
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import cartopy.crs as ccrs
from cartopy.io import shapereader
from cartopy.mpl.gridliner import LONGITUDE_FORMATTER, LATITUDE_FORMATTER
def make_map(projection=ccrs.PlateCarree()):
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(9, 13),
subplot_kw=dict(projection=projection))
gl = ax.gridlines(draw_labels=True)
gl.xlabels_top = gl.ylabels_right = False
gl.xformatter = LONGITUDE_FORMATTER
gl.yformatter = LATITUDE_FORMATTER
return fig, ax
import cartopy.io.img_tiles as cimgt
extent = [-39, -38.25, -13.25, -12.5]
request = cimgt.GoogleTiles()
fig, ax = make_map(projection=request.crs)
ax.set_extent(extent)
ax.add_image(request, 10)
Generates:
Which looks very poor—look at the pixelated rendering of text label and street number—compared to the same image shown on the linked website:
Changing zoom level does not seem to improve the situation.
This is another example on a map I was working on as rendered by Cartopy and googletiles():
Same map displayed in Google Maps
Does anybody know what could be the cause of this strange issue and how to address it?
This question was also asked on the cartopy issue tracker at https://github.com/SciTools/cartopy/issues/1048, where it was suggested setting the interpolation=
keyword argument. This is the standard matplotlib interpolation for imshow, which is documented at https://matplotlib.org/gallery/images_contours_and_fields/interpolation_methods.html.
We determined in the issue tracker that an interpolation of nearest
is what you are seeing here. Changing that to bilinear
gives a good result, and an even better result is achievable with different interpolation schemes. For example the spline36
scheme results in a very pleasant image...
So, with your example code of:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import cartopy.crs as ccrs
from cartopy.io import shapereader
from cartopy.mpl.gridliner import LONGITUDE_FORMATTER, LATITUDE_FORMATTER
import cartopy.io.img_tiles as cimgt
extent = [-39, -38.25, -13.25, -12.5]
request = cimgt.OSM()
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(9, 13))
ax = plt.axes(projection=request.crs)
gl = ax.gridlines(draw_labels=True, alpha=0.2)
gl.xlabels_top = gl.ylabels_right = False
gl.xformatter = LONGITUDE_FORMATTER
gl.yformatter = LATITUDE_FORMATTER
ax.set_extent(extent)
ax.add_image(request, 10)
plt.show()
We get:
To set bilinear
interpolation, we can change the add_image
line to:
ax.add_image(request, 10, interpolation='bilinear')
Even better, let's try something like spline36 with:
ax.add_image(request, 10, interpolation='spline36')
Putting these images side-by-side:
There is a caveat (as pointed out in https://github.com/SciTools/cartopy/issues/1048#issuecomment-417001744) for the case when the tiles are being plotted on their non-native projection. In that situation we have two variables to configure: