for my final year project I am developing an android app that can capture the image of a leaf and identify what type of tree it came from. I have a nearly completed PC version
Sounds like you just want to work with bitmaps and be able to manipulate the pixels themselves in an array. The Bitmap class comes to mind along with its getPixels method. Remember though that you have much more limited memory on a mobile device. It's easy to run into out of memory problems when working with large bitmaps.
Another route would be to use the NDK. I don't have much experience there, but AndroidBitmap_lockPixels
and AndroidBitmap_unlockPixels
are probably a good place to start.
Lastly, yet another option that should perform pretty well is to use RenderScript.
If all you're looking to do is load an image into an int
array though, Bitmap.getPixels
should be quite sufficient.