Question

I just ran into an issue while trying to write an bitmap-manipulating algo for an android device.

I have a 1680×128 pixel Bitmap and need to apply a filter on it. But this very simple code-piece actually took almost 15-20 seconds to run on my Android device (xperia ray with a 1Ghz processor).

So I tried to find the bottleneck and reduced as many code lines as possible and ended up with the loop itself, which took almost the same time to run.

for (int j = 0; j < 128; j++) {
    for (int i = 0; i < 1680; i++) {
         Double test = Math.random();
    }
}

Is it normal for such a device taking so much time in a simple for-loop with no difficult operations?

I’m very new to programming on mobile devices so please excuse if this question may be stupid.

UPDATE: Got it faster now with some simpler operations.

But back to my main problem:

public static void filterImage(Bitmap img, FilterStrategy filter) {
    img.prepareToDraw();
    int height = img.getHeight();
    int width = img.getWidth();
            RGB rgb;
    for (int j = 0; j < height; j++) {
        for (int i = 0; i < width; i++) {
            rgb = new RGB(img.getPixel(i, j));
            if (filter.isBlack(rgb)) {
                img.setPixel(i, j, 0);
            } else
                img.setPixel(i, j, 0xffffffff);
        }
    }
    return;
}

The code above is what I really need to run faster on the device. (nearly immediate)
Do you see any optimizing potential in it?

RGB is only a class that calculates the red, green and blue value and the filter simply returns true if all three color parts are below 100 or any othe specified value.
Already the loop around img.getPixel(i,j) or setPixel takes 20 or more seconds. Is this such an expensive operation?

Answer 1

First of all Stephen C makes a good argument: Try to avoid creating a bunch of RGB-objects.

Second of all, you can make a huge improvement by replacing your relatively expensive calls to getPixel with a single call to getPixels

I made some quick testing and managed to cut to runtime to about 10%. Try it out. This was the code I used:

int[] pixels = new int[height * width];
img.getPixels(pixels, 0, width, 0, 0, width, height);

for(int pixel:pixels) {
    // check the pixel
}