Displaying an image with matplotlib having resolution greater than screen resolution

Question

I am trying to display a sentinel-1 satellite image which is of size 26000(width) X 17000(height) pixels and using Python 3.5. I am able to load this image in numpy as an array and trying to display in matplotlib but unable to do as it gives Memory Error..The screen resolution is 1600(width) X 1200(height) pixels.I am using windows 7 with 8GB RAM. I agree that it might not be able to display due to memory constraints but is there any way I can display such huge image ? Also I have seen many satellite image processing softwares such as SNAP(sentinel toolbox) which can display such huge images in the above specified screen resolution, but cannot find how they do it. Kindly help.

Answer 1

Tried to create an image with the width and height as specified by you. My screen resolution is 1920 by 1080, FHD

import matplotlib
matplotlib.rcParams['figure.dpi'] = 120
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import cm
from numpy.random import randn
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
data = np.clip(randn(26000, 17000), -1, 1)
cax = ax.imshow(data, interpolation='nearest', cmap=cm.coolwarm)

cbar = fig.colorbar(cax, ticks=[-1, 0, 1])
cbar.ax.set_yticklabels(['< -1', '0', '> 1'])  

plt.show()

The plot is generated but about 7GB of memory is eaten by python!