Recently I wanted to process and display camera frames using my Android G1. I’ve done similar things using Python on S60 and Windows Mobile 6 and expected it to be quite easy on the G1 as well. As first step I extended a SurfaceView that uses the camera and calls setPreviewCallback to register a onPreviewFrame callback and receive images from the camera as described in several tutorials. The camera frames are then displayed via my SurfaceView and I receive the according data as well.

However, I wanted to keep the processing of the frames and displaying the frames in sync. With the simple approach this is not possible because the onPreviewFrame is not synchronized with displaying the frames. My alternative was to not display the frames with the SurfaceView directly but convert the received image data to an OpenGL texture and render the camera viewfinder with OpenGL ES. This works surprisingly fast on my G1. In the video below I render the camera frames on an OpenGL rectangle to get some fancy effects.

My viewfinder is grayscale because I only copy the luminance part of the camera frames (which is encoded in a YUV colour space) to the OpenGL texture. Decomposing also the U and V part is probably a bit slower. Copying a 160×240 YUV frame to a 256×256 luminance array (which is used to create the texture) is very simple and looks as follows.

public static void yuvToLum160x240(byte[] yuv, byte[] lum) {
int lumCount=0;
int yuvCount=0;
for (int y=0;y<160;y++) {
System.arraycopy(yuv, yuvCount, lum, lumCount, 240);
yuvCount=yuvCount+240;
lumCount=lumCount+256;
}
}