For people coming here from Google looking for a fast way to downsample images in numpy arrays for use in Machine Learning applications, here's a super fast method (adapted from here ). This method only works when the input dimensions are a multiple of the output dimensions.
The following examples downsample from 128x128 to 64x64 (this can be easily changed).
Channels last ordering
# large image is shape (128, 128, 3)
# small image is shape (64, 64, 3)
input_size = 128
output_size = 64
bin_size = input_size // output_size
small_image = large_image.reshape((output_size, bin_size,
output_size, bin_size, 3)).max(3).max(1)
Channels first ordering
# large image is shape (3, 128, 128)
# small image is shape (3, 64, 64)
input_size = 128
output_size = 64
bin_size = input_size // output_size
small_image = large_image.reshape((3, output_size, bin_size,
output_size, bin_size)).max(4).max(2)
For grayscale images just change the 3 to a 1 like this:
Channels first ordering
# large image is shape (1, 128, 128)
# small image is shape (1, 64, 64)
input_size = 128
output_size = 64
bin_size = input_size // output_size
small_image = large_image.reshape((1, output_size, bin_size,
output_size, bin_size)).max(4).max(2)
This method uses the equivalent of max pooling. It's the fastest way to do this that I've found.