Android: rotate image without loading it to memory

For the 90-degrees rotations I really embrace RenderScript which is exactly designed to deal with bitmaps and is unexpectedly even faster than the default Bitmap.createBitmap(). The in-process bitmap isn’t stored on the Java heap, therefore not pushing you into OutOfMemoryError.

After you set up the RenderScript support in your project with few lines, here is the RenderScript algorithm to use:

1) Create app\src\main\rs\rotator.rs RenderScript file with the following content.

#pragma version(1)
#pragma rs java_package_name(ua.kulku.rs)

rs_allocation inImage;
int inWidth;
int inHeight;

uchar4 __attribute__ ((kernel)) rotate_90_clockwise (uchar4 in, uint32_t x, uint32_t y) {
    uint32_t inX  = inWidth - 1 - y;
    uint32_t inY = x;
    const uchar4 *out = rsGetElementAt(inImage, inX, inY);
    return *out;
}

uchar4 __attribute__ ((kernel)) rotate_270_clockwise (uchar4 in, uint32_t x, uint32_t y) {
    uint32_t inX = y;
    uint32_t inY = inHeight - 1 - x;

    const uchar4 *out = rsGetElementAt(inImage, inX, inY);
    return *out;
}

Pay attention to ua.kulku.rs, that’s some package name you choose for the auto-generate RS Java interface.

2) Reference it in your Java code:

import ua.kulku.rs.ScriptC_rotator;

    public Bitmap rotate(Bitmap bitmap) {
        RenderScript rs = RenderScript.create(mContext);
        ScriptC_rotator script = new ScriptC_rotator(rs);
        script.set_inWidth(bitmap.getWidth());
        script.set_inHeight(bitmap.getHeight());
        Allocation sourceAllocation = Allocation.createFromBitmap(rs, bitmap,
                Allocation.MipmapControl.MIPMAP_NONE,
                Allocation.USAGE_SCRIPT);
        bitmap.recycle();
        script.set_inImage(sourceAllocation);

        int targetHeight = bitmap.getWidth();
        int targetWidth = bitmap.getHeight();
        Bitmap.Config config = bitmap.getConfig();
        Bitmap target = Bitmap.createBitmap(targetWidth, targetHeight, config);
        final Allocation targetAllocation = Allocation.createFromBitmap(rs, target,
                Allocation.MipmapControl.MIPMAP_NONE,
                Allocation.USAGE_SCRIPT);
        script.forEach_rotate_90_clockwise(targetAllocation, targetAllocation);
        targetAllocation.copyTo(target);
        rs.destroy();
        return target;
    }

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For 180-degrees rotations, NDK solution outperformed RenderScript, as for me, due to making use of the sequential array item access, as the 180-degree rotation is actually the reversion of the image’s pixel array. The NDK algorithm I’ve used in these comparisons is from https://github.com/AndroidDeveloperLB/AndroidJniBitmapOperations . The in-process bitmap is also not stored on the Java heap, preventing OutOfMemoryError.

The stats bars indicate what I got in milliseconds on my Samsung S4 (Android 5.0) for the 13 MP photo.