# Fastest possible way to rotate an image?

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Hallo, What is the fastest possible way to rotate an image n degrees? Now I am doing it pixel by pixel, and checking them against the bounding box. It is a bit to slow and would like to speed it up. If it has anything to say, the image is stored as a list of colors in a one dimensional array: eg. imageArray[0] // pixel_1 blue imageArray[1] // pixel_1 green imageArray[2] // pixel_1 red imageArray[3] // pixel_2 blue ... thanks:)

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You have to do it pixel by pixel unless you call an opengl or directx function to do it that may offload it to the gpu (hence faster). As far as the math goes as long as you're doing it in matrix form there's not really any way to speed it up. I do recommend, if you're not already doing it, for quality purposes that you invert your rotation and go through each pixel in the result image and map it back to the original.

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You have to do it pixel by pixel, but work backwards, as the above poster noted, start with the rotated destination image and for each pixel, work backwards to figure what source pixel it corresponds most closely to. (there are probably lots of sophisticated dithering ideas I'm ignoring right there.)

If the image data is static, you can rotate it once through 360 degrees at whatever intervals of the circle you need, and cache the pre-rotated images.

Then when you need the image rotated to n degrees, you'll already have it lying around, it's just image[n], for instance. You might also consider using something other than degrees as your angular unit, like 256ths of a circle, so the angle can fit into a byte, or 32nds of a circle, if 256 increments is overkill. You might store more precision, but render less precision, for instance, if storing 256 slightly rotated versions of each image is too memory intensive. How much precision you need there depends on what you're trying to do.

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You may not want the "fastest" way (in software) as it doesn't look particularly good. I imagine you just want something much faster than you have so far. In order to get any kind of decent result you need to perform bilinear filtering.

Here is an excellent article about making a 2D renderer that makes heavy use of rotation.

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Hey,

Thanks for the replies.

I am doing the rotation backwards, just forgot to mention it.

smcameron:
Ill try to pre-rotate it to 256 different degrees. Thanks for the tips :)
As of now memory is not really a problem (but cache misses are), as its the cpu that is using most of the time.

iMalc:
Thanks a lot for the article. Look like you have a lot of experience with software rendering? If I remember correct, you made a 3d software render as well? Im trying to add a bit of 3d to my engine, but Im having trouble getting the textures to work.

Thanks :)

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What does your rotation code look like? The inside of your loops should have no trig functions and no multiplies; when you have the source coordinates for one pixel, the source coordinates for an adjacent pixel can be found by simply adding precomputed values.

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I'm a bit in a hurry so short answer. If your code suffers from cache misses try tiling your images. At an angle above 90 degress you get essentially a cache miss for every pixel. 8*8 or 16*16 tiles should do better. At least this was the solution when I was doing this stuff on 486 in assembler.

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Quote:
 Original post by VorpyWhat does your rotation code look like? The inside of your loops should have no trig functions and no multiplies; when you have the source coordinates for one pixel, the source coordinates for an adjacent pixel can be found by simply adding precomputed values.

From reading your responds, I think the code can be optimized a bit more, but in not 100% sure on how. Any tips ?

// Convert from radians to degrees. This is the valuse we use to rotate the point back// to find the right sprite pixelfloat cosVal = float(cos(-(rotation * PI / 180.0)));float sinVal = float(sin(-(rotation * PI / 180.0)));// For each pixel in the aliignedBox go back to the texture and see if there is a pixel there.// if it is, copy the color of itfor(int y = yPos; y < (yPos + newTextureRec.getHeight()) ; y++){	for(int x = xPos; x < (xPos + newTextureRec.getWidth()) ; x++)	{		vertex point(x,y);		if(boundingBox.pointIntersection(point))		{			// Rotate the point back to find the right pixel color			int newX = (int)(point.x * cosVal - point.y * sinVal);			int newY = (int)(point.y * cosVal + point.x * sinVal);			// Find the correct sprite pixel			BYTE *textureDataPnt = spriteData + (newY * getWidth() + newX) * 4;			// Do the Drawing 			// Draw the point			int offset = 4 * ((y * screenRec.getWidth()) + x);			// So alpha checking code			screenData[offset+0] = screenData[offset+0] + (( textureDataPnt[3] * (textureDataPnt[0] - screenData[offset+0] )) >> 8);			// ... More drawing code		}	}}// See if a point is inside a rectangle or notbool BoundingBox::pointIntersection(vertex &point){	point.x -= vertexList[1].x;	point.y -= vertexList[1].y;    Vector2D v0( point.x, point.y );    Vector2D v1( (vertexList[0].x - vertexList[1].x), (vertexList[0].y - vertexList[1].y));		float val_1  = Dot(v0,v1);	    if(0 <= val_1 && val_1 <= Dot(v1,v1))	{		Vector2D v2( (vertexList[3].x - vertexList[1].x), (vertexList[3].y - vertexList[1].y));		float val_2  = Dot(v0,v2);		if( 0 <= val_2 && val_2 <= Dot(v2,v2) )			return true;    }        return false;}

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There's a number of problems with that piece of code.
The first realization is that the texture coordinates only change by a constant value each horizontal and vertical pixel. That is you can keep running counters and add cosVal to the x component and sinVal to the y component for each pixel. Typically you'd also avoid the texture width multiplication by restricting the textures to powers of two and shifting/masking instead.
Similarly there's no need to recalculate the destination pointer for each pixel. It'll simply be increasing by one for each horizontal step, and a getWidth() units for each vertical step, so calculate the base address once at the beginning of the loop and add the appropriate deltas within the loops here too.
Another major performance hit, although this has gotten better with recent CPU models and instruction sets, is the conversion from floating point to integers. So use fixed point or SIMD intrinsics for fast conversions.
Poor cache behavior is a big problem for large images, especially at near 90-degree angles. There are a number ways to deal with this, such as texture swizzling, but probably the easiest solution is simply render the bitmap in small (8x8 say) tiles.
You probably don't want to clip each pixel in the innerloop either. This is typically handled by writing a general-purpose polygon scan converter rather than implementing a rotozoomer like this. However if you decide to do tiled rendering then you may simply predetermine whether an entire tile is either invisible (skipped), fully visible (rendered without clipping), or partially visible (rendered with a slower innerloop).

As you might have guessed there are any number of other tricks and techniques but those should keep you occupied for a while, depending on how far you want to take these optimizations. Let me know if you want anything clarified.

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Hey,

thanks a lot for your points. Ill look into them, and will see what I can come up with.

There are two thinks I wonder about:
>> So use fixed point or SIMD intrinsics for fast conversions.
Is there a faster way to convert between float/int then casting? I though that the compiler optimized that so that it was as good as possible.
Could you please give an example?

>> probably the easiest solution is simply render the bitmap in small (8x8 say) tiles.
Im not sure I understand how this can lead to a performance gain.

>>You probably don't want to clip each pixel in the innerloop either.
Are you refering to the if(boundingBox.pointIntersection(point)) line?
If so, thats how I do the rotation backwards.
Rotate a point
Check if the point is inside the original sprite
if so, draw it.

Thanks again.

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