Question

I found there’s lacking good documentation in RenderScript, for what I know, forEach in RS is to execute the root() for each individual item in the allocation.

I am trying to make a library for Renderscript that does Image processing, as a starting point, I reached this great answer. But the problem, is that the blur operation is on Each pixel and each pixel requires another loop (n with blur width) of calculation. Although running on multi-core, it is still a bit too slow.

I am trying to modify it to allow (two-pass) box filter, but that requires working on a single row or column instead of cell. So, is there any way to ask foreach to send an array to root()?

Answer 1

rsForEach can only operate upon Allocations.

If you want to have the rsForEach function call root() for each of the image rows you have to pass in an Allocation that is sized to be the same length as the number of rows and then work out which row you should be operating on inside root() (similarly for operating on each column). RenderScript should then divide up the work to run on the resources available (more than one row being processed at the same time on multi core devices).

One way you could do that is by passing in an Allocation that give the offsets (within the image data array) of the image rows. The v_in argument inside the root() will then be the row offset. Since the Allocations the rsForEach call is operating upon is not the image data you cannot write the image out using the v_out argument and you must bind the output image separately.

Here is some RenderScript that show this:

#pragma version(1)
#pragma rs java_package_name(com.android.example.hellocompute)

rs_allocation gIn;
rs_allocation gOut;
rs_script gScript;

int mImageWidth;
const uchar4 *gInPixels;
uchar4 *gOutPixels;

void init() {
}

static const int kBlurWidth = 20;

//
// This is called per row.
// The row indices are passed in as v_in or you could also use the x argument and multiply it by image width.
//
void root(const int32_t *v_in, int32_t *v_out, const void *usrData, uint32_t x, uint32_t y) {
    float3 blur[kBlurWidth];
    float3 cur_colour = {0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f};

    for ( int i = 0; i < kBlurWidth; i++) {
        float3 init_colour = {0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f};
        blur[i] = init_colour;
    }

    int32_t row_index = *v_in;
    int blur_index = 0;

    for ( int i = 0; i < mImageWidth; i++) {
        float4 pixel_colour = rsUnpackColor8888(gInPixels[i + row_index]);

        cur_colour -= blur[blur_index];
        blur[blur_index] = pixel_colour.rgb;
        cur_colour += blur[blur_index];

        blur_index += 1;
        if ( blur_index >= kBlurWidth) {
            blur_index = 0;
        }

        gOutPixels[i + row_index] = rsPackColorTo8888(cur_colour/(float)kBlurWidth);
        //gOutPixels[i + row_index] = rsPackColorTo8888(pixel_colour);
    }
}


void filter() {
    rsDebug("Number of rows:", rsAllocationGetDimX(gIn));
    rsForEach(gScript, gIn, gOut, NULL);
}

This would be setup using the following Java:

    mBlurRowScript = new ScriptC_blur_row(mRS, getResources(), R.raw.blur_row);

    int row_width = mBitmapIn.getWidth();

    //
    // Create an allocation that indexes each row.
    //
    int num_rows = mBitmapIn.getHeight();
    int[] row_indices = new int[num_rows];
    for ( int i = 0; i < num_rows; i++) {
        row_indices[i] = i * row_width;
    }
    Allocation row_indices_alloc = Allocation.createSized( mRS, Element.I32(mRS), num_rows, Allocation.USAGE_SCRIPT);
    row_indices_alloc.copyFrom(row_indices);

    //
    // The image data has to be bound to the pointers within the RenderScript so it can be accessed
    // from the root() function.
    //
    mBlurRowScript.bind_gInPixels(mInAllocation);
    mBlurRowScript.bind_gOutPixels(mOutAllocation);

    // Pass in the image width
    mBlurRowScript.set_mImageWidth(row_width);

    //
    // Pass in the row indices Allocation as the input. It is also passed in as the output though the output is not used.
    //
    mBlurRowScript.set_gIn(row_indices_alloc);
    mBlurRowScript.set_gOut(row_indices_alloc);
    mBlurRowScript.set_gScript(mBlurRowScript);
    mBlurRowScript.invoke_filter();