Opengl - appending to a texture - c

I want to create a texture system where I add to a texture, not overwrite it. My texture has integer values (32 bit). What I want: Ex. I have an integer pixel with bits 100, I want to add 10 to it so it becomes 110.
My current implementation has two textures, one with the previous texture, and a texture to write on. The previous texture's values are read and then rewritten with the new data. Is there a better method to do so because using two textures feel very inefficient?

Depending on what you mean by "appending", you could use additive blending:
glEnable(GL_BLEND);
glBlendEquation(GL_FUNC_ADD);
glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE);
then, the routput of your fragment shader will by added to the current contents of the color buffer. If you use a FBO to render into the texture, you can directly add to this texture.
You should just be careful to not create any feedback loops, so your fragment shader's result should not depend on any sample of the very same texture you render to.
UPDATE
As noted in the comment, the texture in question has GL_RED_INTEGER format. Unfortunately, the blending is only applied on floating-point color buffers (including normalized integers), and never on unnormalized integers.
However, there is another potential approach. The rules for the "feedback loops" I mentioned before have been relaxed with recent OpenGL. The extension GL_ARB_texture_barrier explicitely allowes a fragment shader to read pixels from the same texture it is writing to:
Specifically, the values of rendered fragments are undefined if any
shader stage fetches texels and the same texels are written via fragment
shader outputs, even if the reads and writes are not in the same Draw
call, unless any of the following exceptions apply:
The reads and writes are from/to disjoint sets of texels (after
accounting for texture filtering rules).
There is only a single read and write of each texel, and the read is in
the fragment shader invocation that writes the same texel (e.g. using
"texelFetch2D(sampler, ivec2(gl_FragCoord.xy), 0);").
[...]
This extension has been promoted to a core feature of OpenGL 4.5. This is quite new and not available on a lot of platforms, so it is unclear if you can use it...

Related

Can a GLSL fragment shader run without a framebuffer and similar inconveniences?

Reapeating the above: Can a GLSL fragment shader run without a framebuffer and any rasterization stage?
This perfect answer gives an insight about where to start with SSBO's. The answer has a link to OpenGL ARB extension that has a boilerplate code. The code works for me if made with some changes to work with OpenGL compute programs. But, I really does not get it, how to do with a fragment program? And without any other buffers than SSBO.
The code clearly has fragment source code without any pixel operations, only SSBO ones.
in vec4 color;
void main()
{
uint fragmentNumber = atomicCounterIncrement(fragmentCounter);
if (fragmentNumber < maxFragmentCount) {
fragments[fragmentNumber].position = ivec2(gl_FragCoord.xy);
fragments[fragmentNumber].color = color;
}
}
And later in the C program file:
// Generate, bind, and specify the data store for the atomic counter.
glGenBuffers(1, &counterBuffer);
glBindBufferBase(GL_ATOMIC_COUNTER_BUFFER, 0, counterBuffer);
glBufferData(GL_ATOMIC_COUNTER_BUFFER, sizeof(GLuint), NULL,
GL_DYNAMIC_DRAW);
// Reset the atomic counter to zero, then draw stuff. This will record
// values into the shader storage buffer as fragments are generated.
GLuint zero = 0;
glBufferSubData(GL_ATOMIC_COUNTER_BUFFER, 0, sizeof(GLuint), &zero);
glUseProgram(program);
glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, ...);
As per my setup, I do not have any output with the means of OpenGL pixels. I wish it to stay so. Is it possible, or am I missing something?
P.S The above setup gives me error invalid framebuffer operation after glDrawElements immediately followed by glFinish.
Update 21.03.2021
There is a Framebuffers with no attachments. The only thing you should set in its state is its width and height. And that is somewhat at the course that anyone's heading, if one wish to minimize setup.
The minus of the aformentioned, is that it is still requires some geometry to be fed to rasterization stage. To start the shader stages, you know. But, as a plus, one gets geometry rasterization, wish it or not.
If I have time, I leave some code as a reminder for miself.
Can a GLSL fragment shader run without a framebuffer and similar inconveniences?
No. The fragment shaders need the step that invokes them. The stage that produce fragments called rasterization.
From the khronos wiki:
A Fragment Shader is the Shader stage that
will process a Fragment generated by the Rasterization
into a set of colors and a single depth value.
The fragment shader is the OpenGL pipeline stage after a primitive is rasterized.
And the rasterization needs a render step to produce fragments. The rendering is done to somewhere.
In OpenGL, it is done to framebuffer. So without a framebuffer, you can not render, hence OpenGL
can not produce fragments.
Setup of a framebuffer can be minimized by
Framebuffers with no attachments.
But one needs to supply geometry and render it, to invoke fragment shaders.
Fragment shaders can read and write to arbitrary SSBO. But the usage is not similar to compute shaders.
Fragment shaders invoke on each produced fragment, and compute shaders can be invoked, as I may say, arbitrary.
Many thanks to all commenters who had pointed me to the obvious, by now, reason why the fragment shaders need a render operation.

Seeking some guidance on webcam picture display using GTK+ and Cairo in C

In this question I'm mostly seeking for advice and guidance on overall understanding of some concepts of drawing wth GTK+ and Cairo in C language (IMO the information on topic is rather scarce, also my experience in really modest).
I'm coding some pet application which captures frames from webcam and displays them on a GTK window.
My app is working, but there are some points which I don't feel like grasped.
Overall process:
I've got a webcam frame as an array of bytes mmaped from webcam device to my app's process memory. So when another frame is captured what I have is a 640*480*3 bytes long array which is denoted as being in a RGB24 format. After some searching it looks like for a purpose of displaying it in a GTK window I need to create an object called drawing area using gtk_drawing_area_new(), add a "draw" callback and do "drawing" there in a designated callback. So, according to Cairo "drawing" is a process of applying "source" to "destination". I assume that I already have a source - my webcam mmaped pixels, but it looks like I need to use some "source" that Cairo is able to understand. I found a candidate:
cairo_surface_t* surface = cairo_image_surface_create(CAIRO_FORMAT_RGB24, 640, 480);
As I see this call creates some Cairo acceptable object, which along the way allocates a buffer in my app's memory which I can get, using:
unsigned char* surface_data = cairo_image_surface_get_data(surface);
According to docs this is a 640x480x4 bytes long buffer, which, on a little endian archs, should be filled with BGRA formatted pixel data.
Then I should rearrange my original webcam pixels for EVERY frame captured using this :
for (size_t idx_src=0, idx_dst=0; idx_src<640*480*3; idx_dst+=4, idx_src+=3) {
surface_data[idx_dst] = image[idx_src+2]; //B [3rd pos -> 1st pos]
surface_data[idx_dst+1] = image[idx_src+1]; //G [no change]
surface_data[idx_dst+2] = image[idx_src]; //R [1st pos -> 3rd pos]
}
After this I should do "drawing" with:
cairo_set_source_surface(cr, surface, 0, 0);
cairo_paint(cr);
So questions:
Is it what is supposed to be done for task at hand or I miss
something completely here ?
What confuses me is that I should
rearrange my original webcam pixels for EVERY frame captured (this
presumably consumes some cpu time, could be a limiting factor for
capturing in HD res at high frame rates). Is there some other way ?
Let's suppose I somehow acquire pixels from webcam in a Cairo
conforming format, e.g. 640x480x4 BGRA formatted bytes. Is there a
way to "wrap" this data in some Cairo acceptable object to exclude
pixel rearranging part ?
Any other thoughts I should've consider ?
Thanks for attention.
For most of your questions: Cairo only supports some image formats. Since your data comes in another format, you will have to convert it. All this copying around will likely be too slow. To make this work with an acceptable speed, you would need some other approach. No, I do not have any helpful suggestions here.
An unhelpful one would be: Is there some example for this webcam that you could look at?
Let's suppose I somehow acquire pixels from webcam in a Cairo conforming format, e.g. 640x480x4 BGRA formatted bytes. Is there a way to "wrap" this data in some Cairo acceptable object to exclude pixel rearranging part ?
Yup. cairo_image_surface_create_for_data.

Images and Filters in OpenCL

Lets say I have an image called Test.jpg.
I just figured out how to bring an image into the project by the following line:
FILE *infile = fopen("Stonehenge.jpg", "rb");
Now that I have the file, do I need to convert this file into a bmp image in order to apply a filter to it?
I have never worked with images before, let alone OpenCl so there is a lot that is going over my head.
I need further clarification on this part for my own understanding
Does this bmp image also need to be stored in an array in order to have a filter applied to it? I have seen a sliding window technique be used a couple of times in other examples. Is the bmp image pretty much split up into RGB values (0-255)? If someone can provide a link on this item that should help me understand this a lot better.
I know this may seem like a basic question to most but I do not have a mentor on this subject in my workplace.
Now that I have the file, do I need to convert this file into a bmp image in order to apply a filter to it?
Not exactly. bmp is a very specific image serialization format and actually a quite complicated one (implementing a BMP file parser that deals with all the corner cases correctly is actually rather difficult).
However what you have there so far is not even file content data. What you have there is a C stdio FILE handle and that's it. So far you did not even check if the file could be opened. That's not really useful.
JPEG is a lossy compressed image format. What you need to be able to "work" with it is a pixel value array. Either an array of component tuples, or a number of arrays, one for each component (depending on your application either format may perform better).
Now implementing image format decoders becomes tedious. It's not exactly difficult but also not something you can write down on a single evening. Of course the devil is in the details and writing an implementation that is high quality, covers all corner cases and is fast is a major effort. That's why for every image (and video and audio) format out there you usually can find only a small number of encoder and decoder implementations. The de-facto standard codec library for JPEG are libjpeg and libjpeg-turbo. If your aim is to read just JPEG files, then these libraries would be the go-to implementation. However you also may want to support PNG files, and then maybe EXR and so on and then things become tedious again. So there are meta-libraries which wrap all those format specific libraries and offer them through a universal API.
In the OpenGL wiki there's a dedicated page on the current state of image loader libraries: https://www.opengl.org/wiki/Image_Libraries
Does this bmp image also need to be stored in an array in order to have a filter applied to it?
That actually depends on the kind of filter you want to apply. A simple threshold filter for example does not take a pixel's surroundings into account. If you were to perform scanline signal processing (e.g. when processing old analogue television signals) you may require only a single row of pixels at a time.
The universal solution of course to keep the whole image in memory, but then some pictures are so HUGE that no average computer's RAM can hold them. There are image processing libraries like VIPS that implement processing graphs that can operate on small subregions of an image at a time and can be executed independently.
Is the bmp image pretty much split up into RGB values (0-255)? If someone can provide a link on this item that should help me understand this a lot better.
In case you mean "pixel array" instead of BMP (remember, BMP is a specific data structure), then no. Pixel component values may be of any scalar type and value range. And there are in fact colour spaces in which there are value regions which are mathematically necessary but do not denote actually sensible colours.
When it comes down to pixel data, an image is just a n-dimensional array of scalar component tuples where each component's value lies in a given range of values. It doesn't get more specific for that. Only when you introduce colour spaces (RGB, CMYK, YUV, CIE-Lab, CIE-XYZ, etc.) you give those values specific colour-meaning. And the choice of data type is more or less arbitrary. You can either use 8 bits per component RGB (0..255), 10 bits (0..1024) or floating point (0.0 .. 1.0); the choice is yours.

What's the difference between TMU and openGL's GL_TEXTUREn?

I can't quite understand what's the difference.
I know TMU is a texture mapping unit on GPU, and in opengl, we can have many texture units.I used to think they're the same, that if I got n TMU, then I can have n GL_TEXTURE to use, but I found that this may not be true.
Recently, I was working on an android game, targetting a platform using the Mali 400MP GPU.According to the document, it has only one TMU, I thought that I can use only one texture at a time.But suprisingly, I can use at least 4 textures without trouble.Why is this?
Is the hardware or driver level doing something like swap different textures in/out automatically for me? If so, is it supposed to cause a lot of cache miss?
I'm not the ultimate hardware architecture expert, particularly not for Mali. But I'll give it a shot anyway, based on my understanding.
The TMU is a hardware unit for texture sampling. It does not get assigned to a OpenGL texture unit on a permanent basis. Any time a shader executes a texture sampling operation, I expect this specific operation to be assigned to one of the TMUs. The TMU then does the requested sampling, delivers the result back to the shader, and is available for the next sampling operation.
So there is no relationship between the number of TMUs and the number of supported OpenGL texture units. The number of OpenGL texture units that can be supported is determined by the state tracking part of the hardware.
The number of TMUs has an effect on performance. The more TMUs are available, the more texture sampling operations can be executed within a given time. So if you use a lot of texture sampling in your shaders, your code will profit from having more TMUs. It doesn't matter if you sample many times from the same texture, or from many different textures.
Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) are functional units on the hardware, once upon a time they were directly related to the number of pixel pipelines. As hardware is much more abstract/general purpose now, it is not a good measure of how many textures can be applied in a single pass anymore. It may give an indication of overall multi-texture performance, but by itself does not impose any limits.
OpenGL's GL_TEXTURE0+n actually represents Texture Image Units (TIUs), which are locations where you bind a texture. The number of textures you can apply simultaneously (in a single execution of a shader) varies per-shader stage. In Desktop GL, which has 5 stages as of GL 4.4, implementations must support 16 unique textures per-stage. This is why the number of Texture Image Units is 80 (16x5). GL 3.3 only has 3 stages, and its minimum TIU count is thus only 48. This gives you enough binding locations to provide a set of 16 unique textures for every stage in your GLSL program.
GL ES, particularly 2.0, is a completely different story. It mandates support for at least 8 simultaneous textures in the fragment shader stage and 0 (optional) in the vertex shader.
const mediump int gl_MaxVertexTextureImageUnits = 0; // Vertex Shader Limit
const mediump int gl_MaxTextureImageUnits = 8; // Fragment Shader Limit
const mediump int gl_MaxCombinedTextureImageUnits = 8; // Total Limit for Entire Program
There is also a limit on the number of textures you can apply across all of the shaders in a single execution of your program (gl_MaxCombinedTextureImageUnits), and this limit is usually just the sum total of the limits for each individual stage.

Drawing per-pixel into a backbuffer or texture to display to screen, using opengl - no glDrawPixels()

Basically, I have an array of data (fluid simulation data) which is generated per-frame in real-time from user input (starts in system ram). I want to write the density of the fluid to a texture as an alpha value - I interpolate the array values to result in an array the size of the screen (the grid is relatively small) and map it to a 0 - 255 range. What is the most efficient way (ogl function) to write these values into a texture for use?
Things that have been suggested elsewhere, which I don't think I want to use (please, let me know if I've got it wrong):
glDrawPixels() - I'm under the impression that this will cause an interrupt each time I call it, which would make it slow, particularly at high resolutions.
Use a shader - I don't think that a shader can accept and process the volume of data in the array each frame (It was mentioned elsewhere that the cap on the amount of data they may accept is too low)
If I understand your problem correctly, both solutions are over-complicating the issue. Am I correct in thinking you've already generated an array of size x*y where x and y are your screen resolution, filled with unsigned bytes ?
If so, if you want an OpenGL texture that uses this data as its alpha channel, why not just create a texture, bind it to GL_TEXTURE_2D and call glTexImage2D with your data, using GL_ALPHA as the format and internal format, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE as the type and (x,y) as the size ?
What makes you think a shader would perfom bad? The whole idea of shaders is about processing huge amounts of data very, very fast. Please use Google on the search phrase "General Purpose GPU computing" or "GPGPU".
Shaders can only gather data from buffers, not scatter. But what they can do is change values in the buffers. This allows for a (fragment) shader to write the locations of *GL_POINT*s, which are then in turn placed on the target pixels of the texture. Shader Model 3 and later GPUs can also access texture samplers from the geometry and vertex shader stages, so the fragment shader part gets really simple then.
If you just have a linear stream of positions and values, just send those to OpenGL through a Vertex Array, drawing *GL_POINT*s, with your target texture being a color attachment for a framebuffer object.
What is the most efficient way (ogl function) to write these values into a texture for use?
A good way would be to try to avoid any unnecessary extra copies. So you could use Pixel Buffer Objects which you map to your address space, and use that to directly generate your data into.
Since you want to update this data per frame, you also want to look for efficient buffer object streaming, so that you don't force implicit synchronizations between the CPU and GPU. An easy way to do that in your scenario would be using a ring buffer of 3 PBOs, which you advance every frame.
Things that have been suggested elsewhere, which I don't think I want to use (please, let me know if I've got it wrong):
glDrawPixels() - I'm under the impression that this will cause an interrupt each time I call it, which would make it slow, particularly at high resolutions.
Well, what the driver does is totally implementation-specific. I don't think that the "cause an interrupt each time" is a useful mental image here. You seem to completely underestimate the work the GL implementation will be doing behind your back. A GL call will not correspond to some command which is sent to the GPU.
But not using glDrawPixels is still a good choice. It is not very efficient, and it has been deprecated and removed from modern GL.
Use a shader - I don't think that a shader can accept and process the volume of data in the array each frame (It was mentioned elsewhere that the cap on the amount of data they may accept is too low)
You got this totally wrong. There is no way to not use a shader. If you're not writing one yourself (e.g. by using old "fixed-function pipeline" of the GL), the GPU driver will provide the shader for you. The hardware implementation for these earlier fixed function stages has been completely superseeded by programmable units - so if you can't do it with shaders, you can't do it with the GPU. And I would strongly recommend to write your own shader (it is the only option in modern GL, anyway).

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