How to scale a BufferedImage

AffineTransformOp offers the additional flexibility of choosing the interpolation type.

BufferedImage before = getBufferedImage(encoded);
int w = before.getWidth();
int h = before.getHeight();
BufferedImage after = new BufferedImage(w, h, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
AffineTransform at = new AffineTransform();
at.scale(2.0, 2.0);
AffineTransformOp scaleOp = 
   new AffineTransformOp(at, AffineTransformOp.TYPE_BILINEAR);
after = scaleOp.filter(before, after);

The fragment shown illustrates resampling, not cropping; this related answer addresses the issue; some related examples are examined here.

Unfortunately the performance of getScaledInstance() is very poor if not problematic.

The alternative approach is to create a new BufferedImage and and draw a scaled version of the original on the new one.

BufferedImage resized = new BufferedImage(newWidth, newHeight, original.getType());
Graphics2D g = resized.createGraphics();
g.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_INTERPOLATION,
    RenderingHints.VALUE_INTERPOLATION_BILINEAR);
g.drawImage(original, 0, 0, newWidth, newHeight, 0, 0, original.getWidth(),
    original.getHeight(), null);
g.dispose();

newWidth,newHeight indicate the new BufferedImage size and have to be properly calculated. In case of factor scaling:

int newWidth = new Double(original.getWidth() * widthFactor).intValue();
int newHeight = new Double(original.getHeight() * heightFactor).intValue();

EDIT: Found the article illustrating the performance issue: The Perils of Image.getScaledInstance()