Cursor location and pixel value in a Jupyter notebook inline image

Question

I am using Python 2.7.x with a Jupyter Notebook, matplotlib and %pylab backend with the inline flag %pylab inline to print images below active cells. I would like

Answer 1

The %matplotlib inline backend displays the plot outputs as png images. It may be possible to write some JavaScript for the Jupyter notebook to obtain the color and pixel on mouse over an image in the cell output.

However it may be much easier to just use the %matplotlib notebook backend, which keeps the matplotlib figure alive when plotting it to the output and therefore the usual built-in mouseover functionality is readily available.

Note the picker in the lower right corner of the image, which displays x,y and the value of the current pixel.