Edit 8-31-12: per Joey’s comment below, be mindful of the format of the bitmaps you compare. They may contain padding on the strides that render the bitmaps unequal, despite being equivalent pixel-wise. See this question for more details.
Reading this answer to a question regarding comparing byte arrays has yielded a MUCH FASTER method: using P/Invoke and the memcmp API call in msvcrt. Here’s the code:
[DllImport("msvcrt.dll")]
private static extern int memcmp(IntPtr b1, IntPtr b2, long count);
public static bool CompareMemCmp(Bitmap b1, Bitmap b2)
{
if ((b1 == null) != (b2 == null)) return false;
if (b1.Size != b2.Size) return false;
var bd1 = b1.LockBits(new Rectangle(new Point(0, 0), b1.Size), ImageLockMode.ReadOnly, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
var bd2 = b2.LockBits(new Rectangle(new Point(0, 0), b2.Size), ImageLockMode.ReadOnly, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
try
{
IntPtr bd1scan0 = bd1.Scan0;
IntPtr bd2scan0 = bd2.Scan0;
int stride = bd1.Stride;
int len = stride * b1.Height;
return memcmp(bd1scan0, bd2scan0, len) == 0;
}
finally
{
b1.UnlockBits(bd1);
b2.UnlockBits(bd2);
}
}