Java2D and Float Images

So much for a day off, well I didn't get too wrapped up in work nor too wrapped in coding but I did dabble a bit. It was one of those crappy cold days - no wind, just no sun and a seeping cold that gets into your bones and turns your toes numb and fingers stiff.

I did finally work out one thing, or maybe re-worked it out; how to create Java BufferedImage's backed by a floating point buffer (and i'll get the details out of the way first).

{
        int width = 1024, height = 768;
        float [] data = new float[width * height * 4];

        ColorSpace cs = ColorSpace.getInstance(ColorSpace.CS_sRGB);
        ColorModel cm = new ComponentColorModel(cs, true, false, 
          ColorModel.TRANSLUCENT, DataBuffer.TYPE_FLOAT);
        SampleModel sm = new ComponentSampleModel(DataBuffer.TYPE_FLOAT, width, 
          height, 4, bounds.width * 4, new int[]{0, 1, 2, 3});
        DataBufferFloat db = new DataBufferFloat(data, data.length);
        WritableRaster wr = Raster.createWritableRaster(sm, db, null);
        BufferedImage bimage = new BufferedImage(cm, wr, false, null);
}

Each pixel is then stored in the array data[] in the order R G B, A. With the backing array image ops can work directly on the float data (FFT convolution anyone?), or you can get a Graphics2D from the bimage and work with that.

I was poking at a layered image system, using floating point buffers in RGBA to store everything. I load the image, convert it to the buffers, and run a really crap, really simple multi-pass compositing system to blend them into the display. So I have an image I can scroll around and set the alpha of, but what about drawing?

I recall trying to get float backed buffers working before and not having much luck, so I was going to look at using java2d to write to a byte or short buffer and then just converting that over (good enough for what i want). But I did finally work out the float buffers so I don't need to do that - and that's despite the documentation saying that 'TYPE_FLOAT' is just a placeholder. Actually it's even better since I can just attach a BufferedImage to any arbitrary layer's float array and then use the nice Java2D API to write to directly - there goes most of a 'drawing application'. It only needs a little bit of damaged-area tracking to get this onto the screen efficiently.

Currently i'm still converting the composited float image to INT_RGBA since that is a bit faster than drawing the float-backed image itself, but it isn't a huge difference.



Tada ... 2 layered image, the photo is about 70% opacity by the slider on the right with the 'background' showing through, and the top layer was drawn to using Java2D (I forgot to turn on anti-aliasing, but that's trivial to add). Actually java has it's own compositing mechanism so I can probably throw those few lines of code away too. Update: Tried this. Way too slow. Nevermind.

It doesn't do much, but then it didn't take a lot of code to do it either.