CGBitmapContextCreate on the iPhone/iPad

Question

Hello,

I have a method that needs to parse through a bunch of large PNG images pixel by pixel (the PNGs are 600x600 pixels each). It seems to work great on the Simulator, but on the device (iPad), i get an EXC_BAD_ACCESS in some internal memory copying function. It seems the size is the culprit because if I try it on smaller images, everything seems to work. Here's the memory related meat of method below.

+ (CGRect) getAlphaBoundsForUImage: (UIImage*) image 
{    
    CGImageRef imageRef = [image CGImage];

NSUInteger width = CGImageGetWidth(imageRef);
NSUInteger height = CGImageGetHeight(imageRef);
CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB();

unsigned char *rawData = malloc(height * width * 4);
memset(rawData,0,height * width * 4);

NSUInteger bytesPerPixel = 4;
NSUInteger bytesPerRow = bytesPerPixel * width;
NSUInteger bitsPerComponent = 8;
CGContextRef context = CGBitmapContextCreate(rawData, width, height, bitsPerComponent, bytesPerRow, colorSpace, kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast | kCGBitmapByteOrder32Big);

CGColorSpaceRelease(colorSpace);

CGContextDrawImage(context, CGRectMake(0, 0, width, height), imageRef);
CGContextRelease(context);

/* non-memory related stuff */

free(rawData);

When I run this on a bunch of images, it runs 12 times and then craps out, while on the simulator it runs no problem. Do you guys have any ideas?

Answer 1

I was getting a similar crash on my iPad (iPhoneOS 3.2 of course) using CGImageCreate(). Seeing your difficulty gave me a hint. I solved the problem by aligning my bytesPerRow to the next largest power of 2.

size_t bytesPerRowPower2 = (size_t) round( pow( 2.0, trunc( log((double) bytesPerRow) / log(2.0) ) + 1.0 ) );

Let us know if providing power of 2 row alignment also solves your problem. You would need to allocate *rawData with the adjusted size and pass bytesPerRowPower2 to CGBitmapContextCreate()... The height does not seem to need alignment.

Answer 2

Perhaps CGImageGetBytesPerRow (power of two sounds excessive).

Answer 3

I used a power of two aligned row size in an app that was defining the row size directly, as I was creating images programmatically. But I would also recommend toastie to try CGImageGetBytesPerRow before trying my suggestion as well.