Java - get pixel array from image

Question

I\'m looking for the fastest way to get pixel data (int the form int[][]) from a BufferedImage. My goal is to be able to address pixel (x, y) from

Answer 1

Here is another FastRGB implementation found here:

public class FastRGB {
    public int width;
    public int height;
    private boolean hasAlphaChannel;
    private int pixelLength;
    private byte[] pixels;

    FastRGB(BufferedImage image) {
        pixels = ((DataBufferByte) image.getRaster().getDataBuffer()).getData();
        width = image.getWidth();
        height = image.getHeight();
        hasAlphaChannel = image.getAlphaRaster() != null;
        pixelLength = 3;
        if (hasAlphaChannel)
            pixelLength = 4;
    }

    short[] getRGB(int x, int y) {
        int pos = (y * pixelLength * width) + (x * pixelLength);
        short rgb[] = new short[4];
        if (hasAlphaChannel)
            rgb[3] = (short) (pixels[pos++] & 0xFF); // Alpha
        rgb[2] = (short) (pixels[pos++] & 0xFF); // Blue
        rgb[1] = (short) (pixels[pos++] & 0xFF); // Green
        rgb[0] = (short) (pixels[pos++] & 0xFF); // Red
        return rgb;
    }
}

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What is this?

Reading an image pixel by pixel through BufferedImage's getRGB method is quite slow, this class is the solution for this.

The idea is that you construct the object by feeding it a BufferedImage instance, and it reads all the data at once and stores them in an array. Once you want to get pixels, you call getRGB

Dependencies

import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
import java.awt.image.DataBufferByte;

Considerations

Although FastRGB makes reading pixels much faster, it could lead to high memory usage, as it simply stores a copy of the image. So if you have a 4MB BufferedImage in the memory, once you create the FastRGB instance, the memory usage would become 8MB. You can however, recycle the BufferedImage instance after you create the FastRGB.

Be careful to not fall into OutOfMemoryException when using it on devices such as Android phones, where RAM is a bottleneck