Fast method to copy memory with translation - ARGB to BGR

Question

Overview

I have an image buffer that I need to convert to another format. The origin image buffer is four channels, 8 bits per channel, Alpha, Red, Green, and Blue

Answer 1

I am coming a little late to the party, seeming that the community has already decided for poseur's pshufb-answer but distributing 2000 reputation, that is so extremely generous i have to give it a try.

Here's my version without platform specific intrinsics or machine-specific asm, i have included some cross-platform timing code showing a 4x speedup if you do both the bit-twiddling like me AND activate compiler-optimization (register-optimization, loop-unrolling):

#include "stdlib.h"
#include "stdio.h"
#include "time.h"

#define UInt8 unsigned char

#define IMAGESIZE (1920*1080) 
int main() {
    time_t  t0, t1;
    int frames;
    int frame; 
    typedef struct{ UInt8 Alpha; UInt8 Red; UInt8 Green; UInt8 Blue; } ARGB;
    typedef struct{ UInt8 Blue; UInt8 Green; UInt8 Red; } BGR;

    ARGB* orig = malloc(IMAGESIZE*sizeof(ARGB));
    if(!orig) {printf("nomem1");}
    BGR* dest = malloc(IMAGESIZE*sizeof(BGR));
    if(!dest) {printf("nomem2");}

    printf("to start original hit a key\n");
    getch();
    t0 = time(0);
    frames = 1200;
    for(frame = 0; frame<frames; frame++) {
        int x; for(x = 0; x < IMAGESIZE; x++) {
            dest[x].Red = orig[x].Red;
            dest[x].Green = orig[x].Green;
            dest[x].Blue = orig[x].Blue;
            x++;
        }
    }
    t1 = time(0);
    printf("finished original of %u frames in %u seconds\n", frames, t1-t0);

    // on my core 2 subnotebook the original took 16 sec 
    // (8 sec with compiler optimization -O3) so at 60 FPS 
    // (instead of the 1200) this would be faster than realtime 
    // (if you disregard any other rendering you have to do). 
    // However if you either want to do other/more processing 
    // OR want faster than realtime processing for e.g. a video-conversion 
    // program then this would have to be a lot faster still.

    printf("to start alternative hit a key\n");
    getch();
    t0 = time(0);
    frames = 1200;
    unsigned int* reader;
    unsigned int* end = reader+IMAGESIZE;
    unsigned int cur; // your question guarantees 32 bit cpu
    unsigned int next;
    unsigned int temp;
    unsigned int* writer;
    for(frame = 0; frame<frames; frame++) {
        reader = (void*)orig;
        writer = (void*)dest;
        next = *reader;
        reader++;
        while(reader<end) {
            cur = next;
            next = *reader;         
            // in the following the numbers are of course the bitmasks for 
            // 0-7 bits, 8-15 bits and 16-23 bits out of the 32
            temp = (cur&255)<<24 | (cur&65280)<<16|(cur&16711680)<<8|(next&255); 
            *writer = temp;
            reader++;
            writer++;
            cur = next;
            next = *reader;
            temp = (cur&65280)<<24|(cur&16711680)<<16|(next&255)<<8|(next&65280);
            *writer = temp;
            reader++;
            writer++;
            cur = next;
            next = *reader;
            temp = (cur&16711680)<<24|(next&255)<<16|(next&65280)<<8|(next&16711680);
            *writer = temp;
            reader++;
            writer++;
        }
    }
    t1 = time(0);
    printf("finished alternative of %u frames in %u seconds\n", frames, t1-t0);

    // on my core 2 subnotebook this alternative took 10 sec 
    // (4 sec with compiler optimization -O3)

}

The results are these (on my core 2 subnotebook):

F:\>gcc b.c -o b.exe

F:\>b
to start original hit a key
finished original of 1200 frames in 16 seconds
to start alternative hit a key
finished alternative of 1200 frames in 10 seconds

F:\>gcc b.c -O3 -o b.exe

F:\>b
to start original hit a key
finished original of 1200 frames in 8 seconds
to start alternative hit a key
finished alternative of 1200 frames in 4 seconds

Answer 2

Combining just a poseur's and Jitamaro's answers, if you assume that the inputs and outputs are 16-byte aligned and if you process pixels 4 at a time, you can use a combination of shuffles, masks, ands, and ors to store out using aligned stores. The main idea is to generate four intermediate data sets, then or them together with masks to select the relevant pixel values and write out 3 16-byte sets of pixel data. Note that I did not compile this or try to run it at all.

EDIT2: More detail about the underlying code structure:

With SSE2, you get better performance with 16-byte aligned reads and writes of 16 bytes. Since your 3 byte pixel is only alignable to 16-bytes for every 16 pixels, we batch up 16 pixels at a time using a combination of shuffles and masks and ors of 16 input pixels at a time.

From LSB to MSB, the inputs look like this, ignoring the specific components:

s[0]: 0000 0000 0000 0000
s[1]: 1111 1111 1111 1111
s[2]: 2222 2222 2222 2222
s[3]: 3333 3333 3333 3333

and the ouptuts look like this:

d[0]: 000 000 000 000 111 1
d[1]:  11 111 111 222 222 22
d[2]:   2 222 333 333 333 333

So to generate those outputs, you need to do the following (I will specify the actual transformations later):

d[0]= combine_0(f_0_low(s[0]), f_0_high(s[1]))
d[1]= combine_1(f_1_low(s[1]), f_1_high(s[2]))
d[2]= combine_2(f_1_low(s[2]), f_1_high(s[3]))

Now, what should combine_<x> look like? If we assume that d is merely s compacted together, we can concatenate two s's with a mask and an or:

combine_x(left, right)= (left & mask(x)) | (right & ~mask(x))

where (1 means select the left pixel, 0 means select the right pixel): mask(0)= 111 111 111 111 000 0 mask(1)= 11 111 111 000 000 00 mask(2)= 1 111 000 000 000 000

But the actual transformations (f_<x>_low, f_<x>_high) are actually not that simple. Since we are reversing and removing bytes from the source pixel, the actual transformation is (for the first destination for brevity):

d[0]= 
    s[0][0].Blue s[0][0].Green s[0][0].Red 
    s[0][1].Blue s[0][1].Green s[0][1].Red 
    s[0][2].Blue s[0][2].Green s[0][2].Red 
    s[0][3].Blue s[0][3].Green s[0][3].Red
    s[1][0].Blue s[1][0].Green s[1][0].Red
    s[1][1].Blue

If you translate the above into byte offsets from source to dest, you get: d[0]= &s[0]+3 &s[0]+2 &s[0]+1
&s[0]+7 &s[0]+6 &s[0]+5 &s[0]+11 &s[0]+10 &s[0]+9 &s[0]+15 &s[0]+14 &s[0]+13
&s[1]+3 &s[1]+2 &s[1]+1
&s[1]+7

(If you take a look at all the s[0] offsets, they match just a poseur's shuffle mask in reverse order.)

Now, we can generate a shuffle mask to map each source byte to a destination byte (X means we don't care what that value is):

f_0_low=  3 2 1  7 6 5  11 10 9  15 14 13  X X X  X
f_0_high= X X X  X X X   X  X X   X  X  X  3 2 1  7

f_1_low=    6 5  11 10 9  15 14 13  X X X   X X X  X  X
f_1_high=   X X   X  X X   X  X  X  3 2 1   7 6 5  11 10

f_2_low=      9  15 14 13  X  X  X  X X X   X  X  X  X  X  X
f_2_high=     X   X  X  X  3  2  1  7 6 5   11 10 9  15 14 13

We can further optimize this by looking the masks we use for each source pixel. If you take a look at the shuffle masks that we use for s[1]:

f_0_high=  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  3  2  1  7
f_1_low=   6  5 11 10  9 15 14 13  X  X  X  X  X  X  X  X

Since the two shuffle masks don't overlap, we can combine them and simply mask off the irrelevant pixels in combine_, which we already did! The following code performs all these optimizations (plus it assumes that the source and destination addresses are 16-byte aligned). Also, the masks are written out in code in MSB->LSB order, in case you get confused about the ordering.

EDIT: changed the store to _mm_stream_si128 since you are likely doing a lot of writes and we don't want to necessarily flush the cache. Plus it should be aligned anyway so you get free perf!

#include <assert.h>
#include <inttypes.h>
#include <tmmintrin.h>

// needs:
// orig is 16-byte aligned
// imagesize is a multiple of 4
// dest has 4 trailing scratch bytes
void convert(uint8_t *orig, size_t imagesize, uint8_t *dest) {
    assert((uintptr_t)orig % 16 == 0);
    assert(imagesize % 16 == 0);

    __m128i shuf0 = _mm_set_epi8(
        -128, -128, -128, -128, // top 4 bytes are not used
        13, 14, 15, 9, 10, 11, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3); // bottom 12 go to the first pixel

    __m128i shuf1 = _mm_set_epi8(
        7, 1, 2, 3, // top 4 bytes go to the first pixel
    -128, -128, -128, -128, // unused
        13, 14, 15, 9, 10, 11, 5, 6); // bottom 8 go to second pixel

    __m128i shuf2 = _mm_set_epi8(
        10, 11, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, // top 8 go to second pixel
    -128, -128, -128, -128, // unused
        13, 14, 15, 9); // bottom 4 go to third pixel

    __m128i shuf3 = _mm_set_epi8(
        13, 14, 15, 9, 10, 11, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, // top 12 go to third pixel
        -128, -128, -128, -128); // unused

    __m128i mask0 = _mm_set_epi32(0, -1, -1, -1);
    __m128i mask1 = _mm_set_epi32(0,  0, -1, -1);
    __m128i mask2 = _mm_set_epi32(0,  0,  0, -1);

    uint8_t *end = orig + imagesize * 4;
    for (; orig != end; orig += 64, dest += 48) {
        __m128i a= _mm_shuffle_epi8(_mm_load_si128((__m128i *)orig), shuf0);
        __m128i b= _mm_shuffle_epi8(_mm_load_si128((__m128i *)orig + 1), shuf1);
        __m128i c= _mm_shuffle_epi8(_mm_load_si128((__m128i *)orig + 2), shuf2);
        __m128i d= _mm_shuffle_epi8(_mm_load_si128((__m128i *)orig + 3), shuf3);

        _mm_stream_si128((__m128i *)dest, _mm_or_si128(_mm_and_si128(a, mask0), _mm_andnot_si128(b, mask0));
        _mm_stream_si128((__m128i *)dest + 1, _mm_or_si128(_mm_and_si128(b, mask1), _mm_andnot_si128(c, mask1));
        _mm_stream_si128((__m128i *)dest + 2, _mm_or_si128(_mm_and_si128(c, mask2), _mm_andnot_si128(d, mask2));
    }
}

Answer 3

Although you can use some tricks based on CPU usage,

This kind of operations can be done fasted with GPU.

It seems that you use C/ C++... So your alternatives for GPU programming may be ( on windows platform )

• DirectCompute ( DirectX 11 ) See this video
• Microsoft Research Project Accelerator Check this link
• Cuda
• "google" GPU programming ...

Shortly use GPU for this kind of array operations for make faster calculations. They are designed for it.

Answer 4

You want to use a Duff's device: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device. It's also working in JavaScript. This post however it's a bit funny to read http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0171.html. Imagine a Duff device with 512 Kbytes of moves.

Answer 5

I haven't seen anyone showing an example of how to do it on the GPU.

A while ago I wrote something similar to your problem. I received data from a video4linux2 camera in YUV format and wanted to draw it as gray levels on the screen (just the Y component). I also wanted to draw areas that are too dark in blue and oversaturated regions in red.

I started out with the smooth_opengl3.c example from the freeglut distribution.

The data is copied as YUV into the texture and then the following GLSL shader programs are applied. I'm sure GLSL code runs on all macs nowadays and it will be significantly faster than all the CPU approaches.

Note that I have no experience on how you get the data back. In theory glReadPixels should read the data back but I never measured its performance.

OpenCL might be the easier approach, but then I will only start developing for that when I have a notebook that supports it.

(defparameter *vertex-shader*
"void main(){
    gl_Position    = gl_ModelViewProjectionMatrix * gl_Vertex;
    gl_FrontColor  = gl_Color;
    gl_TexCoord[0] = gl_MultiTexCoord0;
}
")

(progn
 (defparameter *fragment-shader*
   "uniform sampler2D textureImage;
void main()
{
  vec4 q=texture2D( textureImage, gl_TexCoord[0].st);
  float v=q.z;
  if(int(gl_FragCoord.x)%2 == 0)
     v=q.x; 
  float x=0; // 1./255.;
  v-=.278431;
  v*=1.7;
  if(v>=(1.0-x))
    gl_FragColor = vec4(255,0,0,255);
  else if (v<=x)
    gl_FragColor = vec4(0,0,255,255);
  else
    gl_FragColor = vec4(v,v,v,255); 
}
")