matplotlib: figimage not showing in Jupyter notebook

figimage only adds a background to the current figure. If you don't have an already existing figure, the command wont render anything. The following snippet will work both inside and outside IPython Notebook:

%matplotlib inline
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

plt.figure()

x = np.linspace(0, 2 * np.pi, 500)
plt.plot(x, np.sin(x))

data = np.random.randn(500, 500)
plt.figimage(data)

plt.show()

However, it doesn't do what you want/expect. In order to render an image in its true dimensions you would have to play with figsize and dpi, as others have attempted previously [1] [2] [3] [4]:

data = np.random.randn(500, 500)
dpi = 80
shape = data.shape

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(shape[1]/float(dpi), shape[0]/float(dpi)), dpi=dpi, frameon=False)
ax.imshow(data, extent=(0,1,1,0))
ax.set_xticks([])  # remove xticks
ax.set_yticks([])  # remove yticks
ax.axis('off')     # hide axis
fig.subplots_adjust(bottom=0, top=1, left=0, right=1, wspace=0, hspace=0)  # streches the image and removes margins
fig.savefig('/tmp/random.png', dpi=dpi, pad_inches=0, transparent=True) # Optional: save figure
fig.show()