How to Display Custom Images in Tensorboard (e.g. Matplotlib Plots)?

Question

The Image Dashboard section of the Tensorboard ReadMe says:

Since the image dashboard supports arbitrary pngs, you can use this to embed custom visual

Answer 1

Next script does not use intermediate RGB/PNG encoding. It also fixes the issue with additional operation construction during execution, single summary is reused.

Size of the figure is expected to remain the same during execution

Solution that works:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import tensorflow as tf
import numpy as np

def get_figure():
  fig = plt.figure(num=0, figsize=(6, 4), dpi=300)
  fig.clf()
  return fig


def fig2rgb_array(fig, expand=True):
  fig.canvas.draw()
  buf = fig.canvas.tostring_rgb()
  ncols, nrows = fig.canvas.get_width_height()
  shape = (nrows, ncols, 3) if not expand else (1, nrows, ncols, 3)
  return np.fromstring(buf, dtype=np.uint8).reshape(shape)


def figure_to_summary(fig):
  image = fig2rgb_array(fig)
  summary_writer.add_summary(
    vis_summary.eval(feed_dict={vis_placeholder: image}))


if __name__ == '__main__':
      # construct graph
      x = tf.Variable(initial_value=tf.random_uniform((2, 10)))
      inc = x.assign(x + 1)

      # construct summary
      fig = get_figure()
      vis_placeholder = tf.placeholder(tf.uint8, fig2rgb_array(fig).shape)
      vis_summary = tf.summary.image('custom', vis_placeholder)

      with tf.Session() as sess:
        tf.global_variables_initializer().run()
        summary_writer = tf.summary.FileWriter('./tmp', sess.graph)

        for i in range(100):
          # execute step
          _, values = sess.run([inc, x])
          # draw on the plot
          fig = get_figure()
          plt.subplot('111').scatter(values[0], values[1])
          # save the summary
          figure_to_summary(fig)