How to Make a Borderless Subplot of Images in MATLAB

January 27, 2012 by Brian D'Alessandro

Let's say that you have a set of images that you want to tile using imshow() and subplot() in a MATLAB figure. By default, both functions add a padded space around the images to separate them, as this example shows:

I1 = zeros(500,'uint8');
I2 = zeros(500,'uint8')+127;
I3 = zeros(500,'uint8')+255;

figure
subplot(1,3,1), imshow(I1);
subplot(1,3,2), imshow(I2);
subplot(1,3,3), imshow(I3);

Result:

Images With Gaps

However, what if you want to tile the images without any space between them? The imshow() function does have a property to remove the border around a displayed image, by using imshow(I, 'border', 'tight'). This is fine when only one image is being displayed, but subplot() itself adds additional spacing between images. Removing this space is not straightforward, but a gap-less subplot grid can be constructed by using the following function in place of subplot():

function h = subplottight(n,m,i)
    [c,r] = ind2sub([m n], i);
    ax = subplot('Position', [(c-1)/m, 1-(r)/n, 1/m, 1/n])
    if(nargout > 0)
      h = ax;
    end

By using this function, a completely borderless subplot of images can be constructed as follows:

I1 = zeros(500,'uint8');
I2 = zeros(500,'uint8')+127;
I3 = zeros(500,'uint8')+255;

figure
subplottight(1,3,1), imshow(I1, 'border', 'tight');
subplottight(1,3,2), imshow(I2, 'border', 'tight');
subplottight(1,3,3), imshow(I3, 'border', 'tight');

Result:

Images No Gaps

11 comments

March 30, 2014 at 9:22 AM
Matt says:

Thanks Brian saved me a bunch of fiddling.

1
August 17, 2014 at 4:01 AM
shavo says:

Thanks a lot.very useful!

2
April 18, 2015 at 11:29 AM
Sina says:

Thank you so much, Simple and useful!

3
February 28, 2016 at 5:34 AM
Josephine says:

Thank You so much :) :D

4
April 21, 2016 at 11:45 AM
Mohammad Naser says:

Thanks!!! It is very useful.

5
December 21, 2016 at 6:54 AM
rokP says:

King!!!

6
January 30, 2018 at 8:51 PM
Alex says:

Is there an easy way to make a small border between the plots?

7
March 19, 2018 at 2:37 PM
yt says:

Hi, nice code.

However, when I used for 2015b, for n>1, e.g. (10,10,i), there are spaces between images.

How can I fix it?

8
October 20, 2018 at 11:38 AM
xing says:

Perfect solution, thanks so much!

9
September 10, 2019 at 7:20 AM
Frank Smith says:

Thank you so much! Very useful!!!

10
October 30, 2019 at 9:58 PM
Saima Tazreen says:

Hi

How do I combine multiple images with different sizes using this method?

11

Comments are closed.