I have data in the form of a 2D array of intensities that should be plotted in a contour plot. In the end it should look like a topographic map with contour lines like the following image:
The idea is that the typical multitouch gestures (pinch for zooming, dragging for moving around) can be used to navigate the contour plot. The maximum size of the data should be around 4k*4k points, each 4 bytes big.
Is there some plotting library that I can use, or do I have to start from scratch? Is there an easily implemented algorithm for that?
I don’t know of any plotting libraries for Android (or Java for that matter), but I do know a thing or two about plotting in general:
An easy algorithm for creating contours would be Marching Squares. Marching squares creates polygons from your array of data. There should be plenty of examples of this algorithm in Java (try Google Code Search, but read licenses before you use).
If you want to zoom in far you probably want to create bezier curves from these polygons to smooth them out, an example algorithm (with code that should be easily ported to Java) can be found here.
Note: If you want to fill the contours with a color you should consider using a fragment shader instead of creating polygons. Send the data to the shader as a texture and use the intensity to assign a color to each pixel. For this you should know some OpenGL.