Bilinear interpolation

Example of bilinear interpolation on the unit square with the z values 0, 1, 1 and 0.5 as indicated. Interpolated values in between represented by color.

In mathematics, bilinear interpolation is a method for interpolating functions of two variables (e.g., x and y) using repeated linear interpolation. It is usually applied to functions sampled on a 2D rectilinear grid, though it can be generalized to functions defined on the vertices of (a mesh of) arbitrary convex quadrilaterals.

Bilinear interpolation is performed using linear interpolation first in one direction, and then again in another direction. Although each step is linear in the sampled values and in the position, the interpolation as a whole is not linear but rather quadratic in the sample location.

Bilinear interpolation is one of the basic resampling techniques in computer vision and image processing, where it is also called bilinear filtering or bilinear texture mapping.