RenderScript Bound Pointers vs. Allocations - android

Does RenderScript guarantee the memory layout or stride in global pointers bound from the Java layer?
I read somewhere that it is best to use rsGetElementAt / rsSetElementAt functions because the layout is not guaranteed.
But elsewhere it was said to avoid those when targetting GPU optimizations, whereas bound pointers are ok.
In my particular case, I need the kernel to access the value of many surrounding pixels. So far, I have done quite well with float pointers bound from the Java layer.
Java:
script.set_width(inputWidth);
script.bind_input(inputAllocation);
RS:
int width;
float *input;
void root(const float *v_in, float *v_out, uint32_t x, uint32_t y) {
int current = x + width * y;
int above = current - width;
int below = current + width;
*v_out = input[above - 1] + input[above ] + input[above + 1] +
input[current - 1] + input[current] + input[current + 1] +
input[below - 1] + input[below ] + input[below + 1] ;
}
This is a trivial simplification of what I'm actually doing, just to easily illustrate with an example. In reality, I'm doing far more of these combinations and with multiple input images at the same time, so much so, that simly pre-computing the positions for the "above" and "below" rows helps a great deal with the processing time.
As long as memory is guaranteed to be sequential and in the same order you'd normally expect, all is good, and so far I haven't had any problems on my test devices.
But if this memory layout is truly not guaranteed across all devices/processors, and the stride can actually vary, then my code would obviously break and I'd be forced to use rsGetElementAt, such as:
Java:
script.set_input(inputAllocation);
RS:
rs_allocation input;
void root(const float *v_in, float *v_out, uint32_t x, uint32_t y) {
*v_out = rsGetElementAt_float(input, x - 1, y - 1) + rsGetElementAt_float(input, x, y - 1) + rsGetElementAt_float(input, x + 1, y - 1) +
rsGetElementAt_float(input, x - 1, y ) + rsGetElementAt_float(input, x, y ) + rsGetElementAt_float(input, x + 1, y ) +
rsGetElementAt_float(input, x - 1, y + 1) + rsGetElementAt_float(input, x, y + 1) + rsGetElementAt_float(input, x + 1, y + 1) ;
}
The average execution time of the script using rsGetElementAt() (710 ms) is almost twice as much as that of the kernel using input[] (390 ms), I'm guessing because each call must independently re-compute the memory offset for the given x,y coordinates.
My script needs to run continuously, so I'm trying to get every possible bit of performance out of it, and it would be a real pity to ignore such a considerable speedup.
So I'm wondering if anyone could shed some light on this.
Are there really any cases under which bound pointers will not be fully sequential, and is there a way to force them to be?
Is rsGetElementAt() truly necessary in this case, or is it safe to keep using bound pointers relying on a pre-defined stride?

Bound pointers are only guaranteed to be sequential for simple 1D allocations. Any type with more than one dimension should be accessed with get/setElementAt_.
Comments on performance:
rsGetElementAt_float() will typically outperform rsGetElementAt() because it knows the type and can avoid the lookup for stride. This is true of all the typed get/set methods.
Which OS version are you testing on? 4.4 brought some major improvements to this type of code which should be able to pull the address calculations out of the loops for many cases.
The manipulate the pointers approach will force some GPU driver to fallback to the safe path.
Some newer drivers (4.4.1) will be using the HW address calculation unit removing the overhead completely.

Related

The x y parameters definition

I'm trying to understand the mapping kernel in Renderscript.
A sample mapping kernel looks like this
uchar4 RS_KERNEL invert(uchar4 in, uint32_t x, uint32_t y) {
uchar4 out = in;
out.r = 255 - in.r;
out.g = 255 - in.g;
out.b = 255 - in.b;
return out;
}
However, there is not much clarity regarding what the x, y parameters refer to ( whether x points to height or width of the given pixel in a bitmap)
The official documentation only says so much about x, y
A mapping kernel function or a reduction kernel accumulator function may access the coordinates of the current execution using the special arguments x, y, and z, which must be of type int or uint32_t. These arguments are optional.
This is critical information as interchanging and accessing can lead to out of bounds error. If you have worked on it, please give your insights on this.
The x and y (and z, if using a 3D allocation) are the width and height (and depth for 3D). This means that the in parameter of your kernel function corresponds to the data in your allocation at the point x, y.

Perspective Projection in Android in an augmented reality application

Currently I'm writing an augmented reality app and I have some problems to get the objects on my screen. It's very frustrating for me that I'm not able to transform gps-points to the correspending screen-points on my android device. I've read many articles and many other posts on stackoverflow (I've already asked similar questions) but I still need your help.
I did the perspective projection which is explained in wikipedia.
What do I have to do with the result of the perspective projection to get the resulting screenpoint?
The Wikipedia article also confused me when I read it some time ago. Here is my attempt to explain it differently:
The Situation
Let's simplify the situation. We have:
Our projected point D(x,y,z) - what you call relativePositionX|Y|Z
An image plane of size w * h
A half-angle of view α
... and we want:
The coordinates of B in the image plane (let's call them X and Y)
A schema for the X-screen-coordinates:
E is the position of our "eye" in this configuration, which I chose as origin to simplify.
The focal length f can be estimated knowing that:
tan(α) = (w/2) / f (1)
A bit of Geometry
You can see on the picture that the triangles ECD and EBM are similar, so using the Side-Splitter Theorem, we get:
MB / CD = EM / EC <=> X / x = f / z (2)
With both (1) and (2), we now have:
X = (x / z) * ( (w / 2) / tan(α) )
If we go back to the notation used in the Wikipedia article, our equation is equivalent to:
b_x = (d_x / d_z) * r_z
You can notice we are missing the multiplication by s_x / r_x. This is because in our case, the "display size" and the "recording surface" are the same, so s_x / r_x = 1.
Note: Same reasoning for Y.
Practical Use
Some remarks:
Usually, α = 45deg is used, which means tan(α) = 1. That's why this term doesn't appear in many implementations.
If you want to preserve the ratio of the elements you display, keep f constant for both X and Y, ie instead of calculating:
X = (x / z) * ( (w / 2) / tan(α) ) and Y = (y / z) * ( (h / 2) / tan(α) )
... do:
X = (x / z) * ( (min(w,h) / 2) / tan(α) ) and Y = (y / z) * ( (min(w,h) / 2) / tan(α) )
Note: when I said that "the "display size" and the "recording
surface" are the same", that wasn't quite true, and the min
operation is here to compensate this approximation, adapting the
square surface r to the potentially-rectangular surface s.
Note 2: Instead of using min(w,h) / 2, Appunta uses screenRatio=
(getWidth()+getHeight())/2 as you noticed. Both solutions preserve the elements
ratio. The focal, and thus the angle of view, will simply be a bit different,
depending on the screen's own ratio. You can actually use any function you want to
define f.
As you may have noticed on the picture above, the screen coordinates are here defined between [-w/2 ; w/2] for X and [-h/2 ; h/2] for Y, but you probably want [0 ; w] and [0 ; h] instead. X += w/2 and Y += h/2 - Problem solved.
Conclusion
I hope this will answer your questions. I'll stay near if it needs editions.
Bye!
< Self-promotion Alert > I actually made some time ago an article
about 3D projection and rendering. The implementation is in
Javascript, but it should be quite easy to translate.

Android : OpenGL 2.0 Rotation/moving the Camera using Matrix.setLookAtM

So this is my second question today, I might be pushing my luck
In short making a 3D first Person, where you can move about and look around.
In My OnDrawFrame I am using
Matrix.setLookAtM(mViewMatrix, 0, eyeX , eyeY, eyeZ , lookX , lookY , lookZ , upX, upY, upZ);
To move back, forth, sidestep left etc I use something like this(forward code listed)
float v[] = {mRenderer.lookX - mRenderer.eyeX,mRenderer.lookY - mRenderer.eyeY, mRenderer.lookZ - mRenderer.eyeZ};
mRenderer.eyeX += v[0] * SPEED_MOVE;
mRenderer.eyeZ += v[2] * SPEED_MOVE;
mRenderer.lookX += v[0] * SPEED_MOVE;
mRenderer.lookZ += v[2] * SPEED_MOVE;
This works
Now I want to look around and I tried to port my iPhone openGL 1.0 code. This is left/right
float v[] = {mRenderer.lookX - mRenderer.eyeX,mRenderer.lookY - mRenderer.eyeY, mRenderer.lookZ - mRenderer.eyeZ};
if (x > mPreviousX )
{
mRenderer.lookX += ((Math.cos(SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[0]) - (Math.sin(SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[2]));
mRenderer.lookZ += ((Math.sin(SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[0]) + (Math.cos(SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[2]));
}
else
{
mRenderer.lookX -= (Math.cos(SPEED_TURN / 2) *v[0] - Math.sin(SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[2]);
mRenderer.lookZ -= (Math.sin(SPEED_TURN / 2) *v[0] + Math.cos(SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[2]);
}
This works for like 35 degrees and then goes mental?
Any ideas?
First of all I would suggest not to trace the look vector but rather forward vector, then in lookAt method use eye+forward to generate look vector. This way you can loose the update on the look completely when moving, and you don't need to compute the v vector (mRenderer.eyeX += forward.x * SPEED_MOVE;...)
To make things more simple I suggest that you normalize the vectors forward and up whenever you change them (and I will consider as you did in following methods).
Now as for rotation there are 2 ways. Either use right and up vectors to move the forward (and up) which is great for small turning (I'd say about up to 10 degrees and is capped at 90 degrees) or compute the current angle, add any angle you want and recreate the vectors.
The first mentioned method on rotating is quite simple:
vector forward = forward
vector up = up
vector right = cross(forward, up) //this one might be the other way around as up, forward :)
//going left or right:
forward = normalized(forward + right*rotationSpeedX)
//going up or down:
forward = normalized(forward + up*rotationSpeedY)
vector right = cross(forward, up) //this one might be the other way around
vector up = normalized(cross(forward, right)) //this one might be the other way around
//tilt left or right:
up = normalized(up + right*rotationZ)
The second method needs a bit trigonometry:
Normally to compute an angle you could just call atan(forward.z/forward.x) and add some if statements since the produced result is only in 180 degrees angle (I am sure you will be able to find some answers on the web to get rotation from vector though). The same goes with up vector for getting the vertical rotation. Then after you get the angles you can easily just add some degrees to the angles and recreate the vectors with sin and cos. There is a catch though, if you rotate the camera in such way, that forward faces straight up(0,1,0) you need to get the first rotation from up vector and the second from forward vector but you can avoid all that if you cap the maximum vertical angle to something like +- 85 degrees (and there are many games that actually do that). The second thing is if you use this approach your environment must support +-infinitive or this atan(forward.z/forward.x) will brake if forward.x == 0.
And some addition about the first approach. Since I see you are trying to move around the 2D space your forward vector to use with movement speed should be normalized(forward.x, 0, forward.z), it is important to normalize it or you will be moving slower if camera tilts up or down more.
Second thing is when you rotate left/right you might want to force up vector to (0,1,0) + normalize right vector and lastly recreate the up vector from forward and right. Again you then should cap the vertical rotation (up.z should be larger then some small value like .01)
It turned out my rotation code was wrong
if (x > mPreviousX )
{
mRenderer.lookX = (float) (mRenderer.eyeX + ((Math.cos(SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[0]) - (Math.sin(SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[2])));
mRenderer.lookZ = (float) (mRenderer.eyeZ + ((Math.sin(SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[0]) + (Math.cos(SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[2])));
}
else
{
mRenderer.lookX = (float) (mRenderer.eyeX + ((Math.cos(-SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[0]) - (Math.sin(-SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[2])));
mRenderer.lookZ = (float) (mRenderer.eyeZ + ((Math.sin(-SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[0]) + (Math.cos(-SPEED_TURN / 2) * v[2])));
}

Android line drawing game (e.g. Flight Control) tutorial?

I'm looking for a tutorial that allows me to make a simple line tracing app, no other fancy stuff such as collision. If I can get an object to follow a line drawn on the screen at the end of this week that would be wonderful.
After getting familiar with android dev, creating a few apps (calculators, converters), I think I'm ready to step it up a bit with a game containing a main loop.
I think this is exactly what I'm looking for: http://www.rengelbert.com/tutorial.php?id=182
Here is the demo: http://www.rengelbert.com/swf/LineDrawing.html
Your question is actually quite vague and it would help if you actually supplied some code snippets, variables, formulas, to help us understand your scenario. I'm going to make the following assumptions to help me guide an answer:
I have a line segment defined by (x1, y1) - (x2, y2)
I want to make an animation of an object that follows the line segment
The object needs to be orientated the correct direction
Lets assume the object moves at a speed of 1 pixel per second
Okay, now we have established the parameters, we can provide some Java code:
// Define the line segment.
double x1 = /* ... insert value here */;
double y1 = /* ... insert value here */;;
double x2 = /* ... insert value here */;;
double y2 = /* ... insert value here */;;
// Determine both the direction and the length of the line segment.
double dx = x2 - x1;
double dy = y2 - y1;
double length = Math.sqrt(dx * dx + dy * dy); // length of the line segment
double orientation = Math.atan2(dy, dx);
// Now for any time 't' between 0 and length, let's calculate the object position.
double x = x1 + t * dx / length;
double y = y1 + t * dy / length;
showObjectAt(x, y, orientation);
As to following a tutorial on building a game loop for your application, I highly recommend you follow the series on http://www.mybringback.com/ particularly Travis' Android tutorial on working with the SurfaceView object at http://www.mybringback.com/tutorial-series/3266/android-the-basics-28-introduction-to-the-surfaceview/

Does having variations of gestures in gesture library improve recognition?

I'm working on implementing gesture recognition in my app, using the Gestures Builder to create a library of gestures. I'm wondering if having multiple variations of a gesture will help or hinder recognition (or performance). For example, I want to recognize a circular gesture. I'm going to have at least two variations - one for a clockwise circle, and one for counterclockwise, with the same semantic meaning so that the user doesn't have to think about it. However, I'm wondering if it would be desirable to save several gestures for each direction, for example, of various radii, or with different shapes that are "close enough" - like egg shapes, ellipses, etc., including different angular rotations of each. Anybody have experience with this?
OK, after some experimenation and reading of the android source, I've learned a little... First, it appears that I don't necessarily have to worry about creating different gestures in my gesture library to cover different angular rotations or directions (clockwise/counterclockwise) of my circular gesture. By default, a GestureStore uses a sequence type of SEQUENCE_SENSITIVE (meaning that the starting point and ending points matter), and an orientation style of ORIENTATION_SENSITIVE (meaning that the rotational angle matters). However, these defaults can be overridden with 'setOrientationStyle(ORIENTATION_INVARIANT)' and setSequenceType(SEQUENCE_INVARIANT).
Furthermore, to quote from the comments in the source... "when SEQUENCE_SENSITIVE is used, only single stroke gestures are currently allowed" and "ORIENTATION_SENSITIVE and ORIENTATION_INVARIANT are only for SEQUENCE_SENSITIVE gestures".
Interestingly, ORIENTATION_SENSITIVE appears to mean more than just "orientation matters". It's value is 2, and the comments associated with it and some related (undocumented) constants imply that you can request different levels of sensitivity.
// at most 2 directions can be recognized
public static final int ORIENTATION_SENSITIVE = 2;
// at most 4 directions can be recognized
static final int ORIENTATION_SENSITIVE_4 = 4;
// at most 8 directions can be recognized
static final int ORIENTATION_SENSITIVE_8 = 8;
During a call to GestureLibary.recognize(), the orientation type value (1, 2, 4, or 8) is passed through to GestureUtils.minimumCosineDistance() as the parameter numOrientations, whereupon some calculations are performed that are above my pay grade (see below). If someone can explain this, I'm interested. I get that it is calculating the angular difference between two gestures, but I don't understand the way it's using the numOrientations parameter. My expectation is that if I specify a value of 2, it finds the minimum distance between gesture A and two variations of gesture B -- one variation being "normal B", and the other being B spun around 180 degrees. Thus, I would expect a value of 8 would consider 8 variations of B, spaced 45 degrees apart. However, even though I don't fully understand the math below, it doesn't look to me like a numOrientations value of 4 or 8 is used directly in any calculations, although values greater than 2 do result in a distinct code path. Maybe that's why those other values are undocumented.
/**
* Calculates the "minimum" cosine distance between two instances.
*
* #param vector1
* #param vector2
* #param numOrientations the maximum number of orientation allowed
* #return the distance between the two instances (between 0 and Math.PI)
*/
static float minimumCosineDistance(float[] vector1, float[] vector2, int numOrientations) {
final int len = vector1.length;
float a = 0;
float b = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < len; i += 2) {
a += vector1[i] * vector2[i] + vector1[i + 1] * vector2[i + 1];
b += vector1[i] * vector2[i + 1] - vector1[i + 1] * vector2[i];
}
if (a != 0) {
final float tan = b/a;
final double angle = Math.atan(tan);
if (numOrientations > 2 && Math.abs(angle) >= Math.PI / numOrientations) {
return (float) Math.acos(a);
} else {
final double cosine = Math.cos(angle);
final double sine = cosine * tan;
return (float) Math.acos(a * cosine + b * sine);
}
} else {
return (float) Math.PI / 2;
}
}
Based on my reading, I theorized that the simplest and best approach would be to have one stored circular gesture, setting the sequence type and orientation to invariant. That way, anything circular should match pretty well, regardless of direction or orientation. So I tried that, and it did return high scores (in the range of about 25 to 70) for pretty much anything remotely resembling a circle. However, it also returned scores of 20 or so for gestures that were not even close to circular (horizontal lines, V shapes, etc.). So, I didn't feel good about the separation between what should be matches and what should not. What seems to be working best is to have two stored gestures, one in each direction, and using SEQUENCE_SENSITIVE in conjunction with ORIENTATION_INVARIANT. That's giving me scores of 2.5 or higher for anything vaguely circular, but scores below 1 (or no matches at all) for gestures that are not circular.

Categories

Resources