HTML Canvas: draw image without anti-aliasing

Question

I want to do pixel-true rendering of some images on my Canvas. Right now, I obtain the images through Javascript, so my images are HTMLImageElement instances. I can draw these on the Canvas' rendering context with drawImage. However, this performs anti-aliasing on the image, which I don't want.

There appears to be a lower-level image manipulation method named putImageData, operating on ImageData objects. Does this method perform any anti-aliasing? If not, it's a fine candidate for what I'm looking for, but I haven't found out how I can convert or blit an HTMLImageElement to an ImageData instance.

Any advice would be welcome!

Edit: my original problem was solved, I accidentally had a coordinate that was fractional, which forces anti-aliasing. The conversion-to-image-data question still stands though.

Answer 1

The only way to convert an image into an ImageData object is to draw it to a canvas first, so you'll need to create a temporary canvas, draw the image on it, and get the image data from there.

function imageToImageData(image) {
     var canvas = document.createElement("canvas");
     canvas.width = image.width;
     canvas.height = image.height;
     var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
     ctx.drawImage(image, 0, 0);
     return ctx.getImageData(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
}

Note though, that the same-origin policy prevents you from calling getImageData if you draw an image from a different domain to the canvas, so this will only work on images from the same domain as the document. If you need to draw images from other domains, your only option is to call drawImage on the context for you main canvas directly, making sure there are no transformations that will affect the accuracy.