Develop Reference

Opencv findContours in Android seems much slower than findContours in Python. Do you have any suggestion to improve algorithm speed?

it's the first time for me that I ask help here. I will try to be as precise as possible in my question.
I am trying to develop a shape detection app for Android.
I first identified the algorithm which works for my case playing with Python. Basically for each frame I do this:
hsv = cv2.cvtColor(frame, cv2.COLOR_BGR2HSV)
mask = cv2.inRange(hsv, lower_color, upper_color)
contours, _ = cv2.findContours(mask, cv2.RETR_TREE, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
for cnt in contours:
#here I filter my results
by this algorithm I am able to run the analysis realtime on videos having a frame rate of 120fps.
So I tryied to implement the same algorithm on Android Studio, doing the following for each Frame:
Imgproc.cvtColor(frameInput, tempFrame, Imgproc.COLOR_BGR2HSV);
Core.inRange(tempFrame,lowColorRoi,highColorRoi,tempFrame);
List<MatOfPoint> contours1 = new ArrayList<MatOfPoint>();
Imgproc.findContours(tempFrame /*.clone()*/, contours1, new Mat(), Imgproc.RETR_TREE, Imgproc.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE);
for(MatOfPoint c : contours1){
//here I filter my results
}
and I see that only the findContour function takes 5-600ms to be performed at each iteration (I noticed that it takes also more using tempFrame.clone()), allowing more or less to run the analysis with only 2fps.
This speed is not acceptable at all of course. Do you have any suggestion about how to improve this speed? 30-40fps would be already a good target for me.
I will really appreciate any help from you all. Many thanks in advance.

I would suggest trying to do your shape analysis on a lower resolution version of the image, if that is acceptable. I often see directly proportional timing with number of pixels of the image and the number of channels of the image - so if you can halve the width and height it could be a 4 times performance improvement. If that works, likely the first thing to do is a resize, then all subsequent calls have a smaller burden.
Next, be careful using OpenCV in Java/Kotlin because there is a definite cost to marshalling over the JNI interface. You could write the majority of your code in native C++, and then make just a single call across JNI to a C++ function that handles all of the shape analysis at once.

OpenCV Android CameraBridgeViewBase how to grab a frame, process it, and draw it, without being interrupted by frame grabs

I am getting started with OpenCV for Android and I am using the CameraBridgeViewBase class to grab frames. I then call a worker thread to process the frame but I noticed that if my processing takes too long, another frame is grabbed and interrupts my worker thread. How does one get around this? Can you stop the frame grabbing for a period of time? I couldn't find a solution anywhere online!
Cheers,
Kevin

My suggestion is to process the frame in
public Mat onCameraFrame(CvCameraViewFrame inputFrame)
//process before you return the frame
return inputFrame.rgba();
}
your fps will drop but frames will be processed in the same order they are captured

Display a stream of bitmaps at 60fps smoothly on Android 4.x

(This is due to the limitations of the server software I will be using, if I could change it, I would).
I am receiving a sequence of 720x480 JPEG files (about 6kb in size), over a socket. I have benchmarked the network, and have found that I am capable of receiving those JPEGs smoothly, at 60FPS.
My current drawing operation is on a Nexus 10 display of 2560x1600, and here's my decoding method, once I have received the byte array from the socket:
public static void decode(byte[] tmp, Long time) {
try {
BitmapFactory.Options options = new BitmapFactory.Options();
options.inPreferQualityOverSpeed = false;
options.inDither = false;
Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray(tmp, 0, tmp.length, options);
Bitmap background = Bitmap.createScaledBitmap
(bitmap, MainActivity.screenwidth, MainActivity.screenheight, false);
background.setHasAlpha(false);
Canvas canvas = MainActivity.surface.getHolder().lockCanvas();
canvas.drawColor(Color.BLACK);
canvas.drawBitmap(background, 0, 0, new Paint());
MainActivity.surface.getHolder().unlockCanvasAndPost(canvas);
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
As you can see, I am clearing the canvas from a SurfaceView, and then drawing the Bitmap to the SurfaceView. My issue is that it is very, very, slow.
Some tests based on adding System.currentTimeMillis() before and after the lock operation result in approximately a 30ms difference between getting the canvas, drawing the bitmap, and then pushing the canvas back. The displayed SurfaceView is very laggy, sometimes it jumps back and forth, and the frame rate is terrible.
Is there a referred method for drawing like this? Again, I can't modify what I'm getting from the server, but I'd like the bitmaps to be displayed at 60FPS when possible.
(I've tried setting the contents of an ImageView, and am receiving similar results). I have no other code in the SurfaceView that could impact this. I have set the holder to the RGBA_8888 format:
getHolder().setFormat(PixelFormat.RGBA_8888);
Is it possible to convert this stream of Bitmaps into a VideoView? Would that be faster?
Thanks.

Whenever you run into performance questions, use Traceview to figure out exactly where your problem lies. Using System.currentTimeMillis() is like attempting to trim a steak with a hammer.
The #1 thing her is to get the bitmap decoding off the main application thread. Do that in a background thread. Your main application thread should just be drawing the bitmaps, pulling them off of a queue populated by that background thread. Android has the main application thread set to render on a 60fps basis as of Android 4.1 (a.k.a., "Project Butter"), so as long as you can draw your Bitmap in a couple of milliseconds, and assuming that your network and decoding can keep your queue current, you should get 60fps results.
Also, always use inBitmap with BitmapFactory.Options on Android 3.0+ when you have images of consistent size, as part of your problem will be GC stealing CPU time. Work off a pool of Bitmap objects that you rotate through, so that you generate less garbage and do not fragment your heap so much.
I suspect that you are better served letting Android scale the image for you in an ImageView (or just by drawing to a View canvas) than you are in having BitmapFactory scale the image, as Android can take advantage of hardware graphics acceleration for rendering, which BitmapFactory cannot. Again, Traceview is your friend here.
With regards to:
and have found that I am capable of receiving those JPEGs smoothly, at 60FPS.
that will only be true sometimes. Mobile devices tend to be mobile. Assuming that by "6kb" you mean 6KB (six kilobytes), you are assuming a ~3Mbps (three megabits per second) connection, and that's far from certain.
With regards to:
Is it possible to convert this stream of Bitmaps into a VideoView?
VideoView is a widget that plays videos, and you do not have a video.
Push come to shove, you might need to drop down to the NDK and do this in native code, though I would hope not.

Android real-time game - implement time unit

I'll try to explain what I mean.
I'm developing a 2d game. When I run the code below on the small screen it works more quickly than the same code on the big screen. I think it depends on an iteration of the game loop takes more time on the big screen than on the small. How can I implement time unit or something else to it doesn't depend on the iteration of the game loop?
private void createDebris(){
if(dx<=0) return;
if(stepDebris==2){
Debris debris = new Debris(gameActivity, dx-=1280*coefX/77, 800*coefY-50*coefY, coefX, coefY);
synchronized (necessaryObjects) {
necessaryObjects.add(debris);
}
stepDebris=-1;
Log.e("COUNT", (count++)+"");
}
stepDebris++;
}
P.S. Debris is visual object which is drawn on canvas. I'll appreciate your answers. Thanks.

If, stepDebris is the unit by which you move objects on the screen - then incrementing it per draw call is wrong, because it ties the rate of movement to the framerate.
What you want is something like this
stepDebris += elapsedMilliseconds * speedFactor
where elapsedMilliseconds is the time elapsed since the game started (in mS). Once you find the correct speedFactor for stepDebris - it will move at the same speed on different machines/resolutions irrespective of framerate.
Hope this helps!

You can make an 'iteration' take x milliseconds by measuring the time it takes to do the actual iteration (= y), and afterwards sleeping (x-y) millisecs.
See also step 3 of this tutorial

Android provies the Handler API, which implements timed event loops, to control the timing of computation. This article is pretty good.
You will save battery life by implementing a frame rate controller with this interface rather redrawing as fast as you can.

Grabbing consecutive frames in android using opencv

I am trying to grab consecutive frames from android using opencv VideoCapture class. Actually I want to implement optical flow on android for which i need 2 frames. I implemented optical flow in C first where I grabbed the frames using using cvQueryFrame and every thing work fine. But in android when I call
if(capture.grab())
{
if(capture.retrieve(mRgba))
Log.i(TAG, "first frame retrived");
}
if(capture.grab())
{
if(capture.retrieve(mRgba2))
Log.i(TAG, "2nd frame retrived");
}
and then subtract the matrices using Imgproc.subtract(mRgba,mRgba2,output) and then display the output it give me black image indicating that mRgba and mRgba2 are image frames with same data. Can any one help how to grab two different images. According to opencv documentation mRgba and mRgba2 should be different.

This question is an exact duplicate of
read successive frames OpenCV using cvQueryframe
You have to copy the image to another memory block, because the capture always returns the same pointer.