title: Fractal image scaling with Python
body: <p>I am in a position where <strong>relatively low resolution</strong> images are provided (via an API, higher resolution images are not available) and <strong>high resolution</strong> images need to be generated.</p>
  
  <p>I've taken a look at <a href="http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">PIL</a> and it's just great for about everything... Except scaling up images.</p>
  
  <p>It has the common <a href="http://www.pythonware.com/library/pil/handbook/image.htm#Image.resize" rel="nofollow noreferrer">resizing algorithms</a>:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Nearest Neighbor</li>
  <li>Bilinear</li>
  <li>Bicubic</li>
  <li>Anti-aliased</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I would like to use Fractal Resizing (as per <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/better-image-resizing/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">jeff's post on coding horror</a>), but alas, PIL has no support for this kind of resizing.</p>
  
  <p>Further Google searches yield no alternative libraries to provide fractal image resizing either.</p>
  
  <p>Does such a thing exist or do I really have to buckle down and write my own fractal resizing algorithm?</p>
  
  <p>I'm no expert but from my current vantage point, that looks like a pretty steep learning curve :(</p>
  
  <p>If no such library exists, maybe you have some advice where to learn about fractal compression algorithms?</p>