I am working on voltmeter application, that draws voltage waveform. Hardware sends 1000 numbers (range 0 - 1023, always whole numbers) in string format per second through serial port.
public SerialPort serialPort = new SerialPort("COM3", 57600);
serialPort.Open();
String is converted into int and then drawn with DrawLine into PictureBox.
// variable declarations, all is int, runs in its own thread
while (blToMeasure) // true after clicking on button
{
iPrevY = iY;
iY = Int16.Parse(serialPort.ReadLine());
graphicsGraph.DrawLine(penBlack, iX, iPrevY, iX + 1, iY);
// only this thread is accessing PictureBox
iX++;
if (iX > picBoxGraph.Width)
{
graphicsGraph.Clear(SystemColors.Control);
iX = 0;
}
if (iY > picBoxGraph.Height)
{
}
}
Issue is that drawing lines itself is fast as it should be only for a couple of seconds, but gets gradually slower.
I tried Int.Parse, Int32.Parse and splitting thread function multiple ways using lock (graphicsGraph) (moving conditions with Clear into another thread) or using BlockingCollection<int> (moving DrawLine into another thread, away from Parse). Nothing seems to work and app still gets slower a couple of times after like a minute of running.
There isn't issue with hardware itself, checked with another software. Is this too fast for C#?
Solution:
I got the best results using Port.ReadTimeout = 1 and Port.DiscardInBuffer(). Also using Form.DoubleBuffered = true, but it doesn't make a huge difference in this particular case.
// constructor
Port.ReadTimeout = 1;
Form.DoubleBuffered = true;
Here is the loop itself:
btn.Click() // click to start measuring
{
Port.DiscardInBuffer();
blToMeasure = true;
}
while (blToMeasure) // true after clicking on button
{
iPrevY = iY;
try {
iY = Int16.Parse(serialPort.ReadLine());
}
catch
{
// exception logic
}
graphicsGraph.DrawLine(penBlack, iX, iPrevY, iX + 1, iY);
// only this thread is accessing PictureBox
iX++;
if (iX > picBoxGraph.Width)
{
graphicsGraph.Clear(SystemColors.Control);
iX = 0;
}
if (iY > picBoxGraph.Height)
{
}
}
When the app starts to read from the port, there is always accumulated data, because my hardware is sending numbers all the time, so I get rid of the buffer. Than the drawing of lines is not executed in differing spikes and the speed is constant. Analyzing the issue with Watch, I found out, that it occasionaly takes much longer to read this data and because of 1000 reads per second, it slows down. So to prevent slowing down, I used Port.ReadTimeout, that skips the read, if it takes too long.
The difference is visible, drawing no longer slows down and it keeps the same pace for minutes from what I've tried. I consider this sufficient solution for my issue, thank you!
thats how i wrote your beautiful code(some simple changes for me for easier understanding)
private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
prev = GetDesktopImage();//get a screenshot of the desktop;
cur = GetDesktopImage();//get a screenshot of the desktop;
var locked1 = cur.LockBits(new Rectangle(0, 0, cur.Width, cur.Height),
ImageLockMode.ReadWrite, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
var locked2 = prev.LockBits(new Rectangle(0, 0, prev.Width, prev.Height),
ImageLockMode.ReadWrite, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
ApplyXor(locked1, locked2);
compressionBuffer = new byte[1920* 1080 * 4];
// Compressed buffer -- where the data goes that we'll send.
int backbufSize = LZ4.LZ4Codec.MaximumOutputLength(this.compressionBuffer.Length) + 4;
backbuf = new CompressedCaptureScreen(backbufSize);
MessageBox.Show(compressionBuffer.Length.ToString());
int length = Compress();
MessageBox.Show(backbuf.Data.Length.ToString());//prints the new buffer size
}
the compression buffer length is for example 8294400
and the backbuff.Data.length is 8326947
I didn't like the compression suggestions, so here's what I would do.
You don't want to compress a video stream (so MPEG, AVI, etc are out of the question -- these don't have to be real-time) and you don't want to compress individual pictures (since that's just stupid).
Basically what you want to do is detect if things change and send the differences. You're on the right track with that; most video compressors do that. You also want a fast compression/decompression algorithm; especially if you go to more FPS that will become more relevant.
Differences. First off, eliminate all branches in your code, and make sure memory access is sequential (e.g. iterate x in the inner loop). The latter will give you cache locality. As for the differences, I'd probably use a 64-bit XOR; it's easy, branchless and fast.
If you want performance, it's probably better to do this in C++: The current C# implementation doesn't vectorize your code, and that will help you a great deal here.
Do something like this (I'm assuming 32bit pixel format):
for (int y=0; y<height; ++y) // change to PFor if you like
{
ulong* row1 = (ulong*)(image1BasePtr + image1Stride * y);
ulong* row2 = (ulong*)(image2BasePtr + image2Stride * y);
for (int x=0; x<width; x += 2)
row2[x] ^= row1[x];
}
Fast compression and decompression usually means simpler compression algorithms. https://code.google.com/p/lz4/ is such an algorithm, and there's a proper .NET port available for that as well. You might want to read on how it works too; there is a streaming feature in LZ4 and if you can make it handle 2 images instead of 1 that will probably give you a nice compression boost.
All in all, if you're trying to compress white noise, it simply won't work and your frame rate will drop. One way to solve this is to reduce the colors if you have too much 'randomness' in a frame. A measure for randomness is entropy, and there are several ways to get a measure of the entropy of a picture ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) ). I'd stick with a very simple one: check the size of the compressed picture -- if it's above a certain limit, reduce the number of bits; if below, increase the number of bits.
Note that increasing and decreasing bits is not done with shifting in this case; you don't need your bits to be removed, you simply need your compression to work better. It's probably just as good to use a simple 'AND' with a bitmask. For example, if you want to drop 2 bits, you can do it like this:
for (int y=0; y<height; ++y) // change to PFor if you like
{
ulong* row1 = (ulong*)(image1BasePtr + image1Stride * y);
ulong* row2 = (ulong*)(image2BasePtr + image2Stride * y);
ulong mask = 0xFFFCFCFCFFFCFCFC;
for (int x=0; x<width; x += 2)
row2[x] = (row2[x] ^ row1[x]) & mask;
}
PS: I'm not sure what I would do with the alpha component, I'll leave that up to your experimentation.
Good luck!
The long answer
I had some time to spare, so I just tested this approach. Here's some code to support it all.
This code normally run over 130 FPS with a nice constant memory pressure on my laptop, so the bottleneck shouldn't be here anymore. Note that you need LZ4 to get this working and that LZ4 is aimed at high speed, not high compression ratio's. A bit more on that later.
First we need something that we can use to hold all the data we're going to send. I'm not implementing the sockets stuff itself here (although that should be pretty simple using this as a start), I mainly focused on getting the data you need to send something over.
// The thing you send over a socket
public class CompressedCaptureScreen
{
public CompressedCaptureScreen(int size)
{
this.Data = new byte[size];
this.Size = 4;
}
public int Size;
public byte[] Data;
}
We also need a class that will hold all the magic:
public class CompressScreenCapture
{
Next, if I'm running high performance code, I make it a habit to preallocate all the buffers first. That'll save you time during the actual algorithmic stuff. 4 buffers of 1080p is about 33 MB, which is fine - so let's allocate that.
public CompressScreenCapture()
{
// Initialize with black screen; get bounds from screen.
this.screenBounds = Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds;
// Initialize 2 buffers - 1 for the current and 1 for the previous image
prev = new Bitmap(screenBounds.Width, screenBounds.Height, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
cur = new Bitmap(screenBounds.Width, screenBounds.Height, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
// Clear the 'prev' buffer - this is the initial state
using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(prev))
{
g.Clear(Color.Black);
}
// Compression buffer -- we don't really need this but I'm lazy today.
compressionBuffer = new byte[screenBounds.Width * screenBounds.Height * 4];
// Compressed buffer -- where the data goes that we'll send.
int backbufSize = LZ4.LZ4Codec.MaximumOutputLength(this.compressionBuffer.Length) + 4;
backbuf = new CompressedCaptureScreen(backbufSize);
}
private Rectangle screenBounds;
private Bitmap prev;
private Bitmap cur;
private byte[] compressionBuffer;
private int backbufSize;
private CompressedCaptureScreen backbuf;
private int n = 0;
First thing to do is capture the screen. This is the easy part: simply fill the bitmap of the current screen:
private void Capture()
{
// Fill 'cur' with a screenshot
using (var gfxScreenshot = Graphics.FromImage(cur))
{
gfxScreenshot.CopyFromScreen(screenBounds.X, screenBounds.Y, 0, 0, screenBounds.Size, CopyPixelOperation.SourceCopy);
}
}
As I said, I don't want to compress 'raw' pixels. Instead, I'd much rather compress XOR masks of previous and the current image. Most of the times this will give you a whole lot of 0's, which is easy to compress:
private unsafe void ApplyXor(BitmapData previous, BitmapData current)
{
byte* prev0 = (byte*)previous.Scan0.ToPointer();
byte* cur0 = (byte*)current.Scan0.ToPointer();
int height = previous.Height;
int width = previous.Width;
int halfwidth = width / 2;
fixed (byte* target = this.compressionBuffer)
{
ulong* dst = (ulong*)target;
for (int y = 0; y < height; ++y)
{
ulong* prevRow = (ulong*)(prev0 + previous.Stride * y);
ulong* curRow = (ulong*)(cur0 + current.Stride * y);
for (int x = 0; x < halfwidth; ++x)
{
*(dst++) = curRow[x] ^ prevRow[x];
}
}
}
}
For the compression algorithm I simply pass the buffer to LZ4 and let it do its magic.
private int Compress()
{
// Grab the backbuf in an attempt to update it with new data
var backbuf = this.backbuf;
backbuf.Size = LZ4.LZ4Codec.Encode(
this.compressionBuffer, 0, this.compressionBuffer.Length,
backbuf.Data, 4, backbuf.Data.Length-4);
Buffer.BlockCopy(BitConverter.GetBytes(backbuf.Size), 0, backbuf.Data, 0, 4);
return backbuf.Size;
}
One thing to note here is that I make it a habit to put everything in my buffer that I need to send over the TCP/IP socket. I don't want to move data around if I can easily avoid it, so I'm simply putting everything that I need on the other side there.
As for the sockets itself, you can use a-sync TCP sockets here (I would), but if you do, you will need to add an extra buffer.
The only thing that remains is to glue everything together and put some statistics on the screen:
public void Iterate()
{
Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
// Capture a screen:
Capture();
TimeSpan timeToCapture = sw.Elapsed;
// Lock both images:
var locked1 = cur.LockBits(new Rectangle(0, 0, cur.Width, cur.Height),
ImageLockMode.ReadWrite, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
var locked2 = prev.LockBits(new Rectangle(0, 0, prev.Width, prev.Height),
ImageLockMode.ReadWrite, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
try
{
// Xor screen:
ApplyXor(locked2, locked1);
TimeSpan timeToXor = sw.Elapsed;
// Compress screen:
int length = Compress();
TimeSpan timeToCompress = sw.Elapsed;
if ((++n) % 50 == 0)
{
Console.Write("Iteration: {0:0.00}s, {1:0.00}s, {2:0.00}s " +
"{3} Kb => {4:0.0} FPS \r",
timeToCapture.TotalSeconds, timeToXor.TotalSeconds,
timeToCompress.TotalSeconds, length / 1024,
1.0 / sw.Elapsed.TotalSeconds);
}
// Swap buffers:
var tmp = cur;
cur = prev;
prev = tmp;
}
finally
{
cur.UnlockBits(locked1);
prev.UnlockBits(locked2);
}
}
Note that I reduce Console output to ensure that's not the bottleneck. :-)
Simple improvements
It's a bit wasteful to compress all those 0's, right? It's pretty easy to track the min and max y position that has data using a simple boolean.
ulong tmp = curRow[x] ^ prevRow[x];
*(dst++) = tmp;
hasdata |= tmp != 0;
You also probably don't want to call Compress if you don't have to.
After adding this feature you'll get something like this on your screen:
Iteration: 0.00s, 0.01s, 0.01s 1 Kb => 152.0 FPS
Using another compression algorithm might also help. I stuck to LZ4 because it's simple to use, it's blazing fast and compresses pretty well -- still, there are other options that might work better. See http://fastcompression.blogspot.nl/ for a comparison.
If you have a bad connection or if you're streaming video over a remote connection, all this won't work. Best to reduce the pixel values here. That's quite simple: apply a simple 64-bit mask during the xor to both the previous and current picture... You can also try using indexed colors - anyhow, there's a ton of different things you can try here; I just kept it simple because that's probably good enough.
You can also use Parallel.For for the xor loop; personally I didn't really care about that.
A bit more challenging
If you have 1 server that is serving multiple clients, things will get a bit more challenging, as they will refresh at different rates. We want the fastest refreshing client to determine the server speed - not slowest. :-)
To implement this, the relation between the prev and cur has to change. If we simply 'xor' away like here, we'll end up with a completely garbled picture at the slower clients.
To solve that, we don't want to swap prev anymore, as it should hold key frames (that you'll refresh when the compressed data becomes too big) and cur will hold incremental data from the 'xor' results. This means you can basically grab an arbitrary 'xor'red frame and send it over the line - as long as the prev bitmap is recent.
H264 or Equaivalent Codec Streaming
There are various compressed streaming available which does almost everything that you can do to optimize screen sharing over network. There are many open source and commercial libraries to stream.
Screen transfer in Blocks
H264 already does this, but if you want to do it yourself, you have to divide your screens into smaller blocks of 100x100 pixels, and compare these blocks with previous version and send these blocks over network.
Window Render Information
Microsoft RDP does lot better, it does not send screen as a raster image, instead it analyzes screen and creates screen blocks based on the windows on the screen. It then analyzes contents of screen and sends image only if needed, if it is a text box with some text in it, RDP sends information to render text box with a text with font information and other information. So instead of sending image, it sends information on what to render.
You can combine all techniques and make a mixed protocol to send screen blocks with image and other rendering information.
Instead of handling data as an array of bytes, you can handle it as an array of integers.
int* p = (int*)((byte*)scan0.ToPointer() + y * stride);
int* p2 = (int*)((byte*)scan02.ToPointer() + y * stride2);
for (int x = 0; x < nWidth; x++)
{
//always get the complete pixel when differences are found
if (*p2 != 0)
*p = *p2
++p;
++p2;
}
I get some big chunks of audio samples pushed by the sound card.
I want to start from the beginning of the chunk and apply a function on part of the chunk. This function is checking zero-crossing rate.
I thought of copying a part of the chunk to temporary buffer - something like a shifted buffer. And always pushing new sample to the temp buffer. I don't want to miss samples comes from the sound card(so that the previous bytes that have not been checked yet won't run over).
What is the best way to generate such a case?
This is how my event of audio samples from sound card look like:
void myWaveIn_DataAvailable(object sender, WaveInEventArgs e)
{
for (int index = 0; index < e.BytesRecorded; index += 2)//Here I convert in a loop the stream into floating number samples
{
short sample = (short)((e.Buffer[index + 1] << 8) |
e.Buffer[index + 0]);
SamplesBuf.Add = (sample / 32768f);//IEEE 32 floating number
}
//Do some processing on SamplesBuf
}
I have a working implementation of NAudio's wasapi loopback recording and the FFT of the data.
Most of the data I get is just as it should be but every once in a while (10 sec to minutes intervals) it shows amplitude on almost all frequencies.
Basicly the picture is rolling from right to left with time and frequencies going on logarithmic scale from lowest frequencies on the bottom. The lines are the errors. As far as i can tell those are not supposed to be there.
I get the audio buffer and send the samples to an aggregator (applies Hamming window) which implements the NAudio FFT. I have checked the data (FFT result) before I modify it in any way (the picture is not from the raw FFT output, but desibel scaled) confirming the FFT result is giving those lines. I could also point out the picture is modified with LockBits so I thought I had something wrong with the logic there, but that's why I checked the FFT output data which shows the same problem.
Well I could be wrong and the problem might be somewhere I said it isn't but it really seems it originates from the FFT OR the buffer data (data itself or the aggregation of samples). Somehow I doubt the buffer itself is corrupted like this.
If anyone has any idea what could cause this I would greatly appreciate it!
UPDATE
So I decided to draw the whole FFT result range rather than half of it. It showed something strange. I'm not sure of FFT but I thought Fourier transformation should give a result that is mirrored around the middle. This certainly is not the case here.
The picture is in linear scale so the exact middle of the picture is the middle point of the FFT result. Bottom is the first and top is the last.
I was playing a 10kHz sine wave which gives the two horizontal lines there but the top part is beyond me. It also seems like the lines are mirrored around the bottom quarter of the picture so that seems strange to me as well.
UPDATE 2
So I increased the FFT size from 4096 to 8192 and tried again. This is the output with me messing with the sine frequency.
It would seem the result is mirrored twice. Once in the middle and then again on the top and bottom halves. And the huge lines are now gone.. And it would seem like the lines only appear on the bottom half now.
After some further testing with different FFT lengths it seems the lines are completely random in that account.
UPDATE 3
I have done some testing with many things. The latest thing I added was overlapping of samples so that I reuse the last half of the sample array in the beginning of the next FFT. On Hamming and Hann windows it gives me massive intensities (quite like in the second picture I posted) but not with BlackmannHarris. Disabling overlapping removes the biggest errors on every window function. The smaller errors like in the top picture still remain even with BH window. I still have no idea why those lines appear.
My current form allows control over which window function to use (of the three previously mentioned), overlapping (on/off) and multiple different drawing options. This allows me to compare all the affecting parties effects when changed.
I shall investigate further (I am quite sure I have made a mistake at some point) but good suggestions are more than welcome!
The problem was in the way I handled the data arrays. Working like a charm now.
Code (removed excess and might have added mistakes):
// Other inputs are also usable. Just look through the NAudio library.
private IWaveIn waveIn;
private static int fftLength = 8192; // NAudio fft wants powers of two!
// There might be a sample aggregator in NAudio somewhere but I made a variation for my needs
private SampleAggregator sampleAggregator = new SampleAggregator(fftLength);
public Main()
{
sampleAggregator.FftCalculated += new EventHandler<FftEventArgs>(FftCalculated);
sampleAggregator.PerformFFT = true;
// Here you decide what you want to use as the waveIn.
// There are many options in NAudio and you can use other streams/files.
// Note that the code varies for each different source.
waveIn = new WasapiLoopbackCapture();
waveIn.DataAvailable += OnDataAvailable;
waveIn.StartRecording();
}
void OnDataAvailable(object sender, WaveInEventArgs e)
{
if (this.InvokeRequired)
{
this.BeginInvoke(new EventHandler<WaveInEventArgs>(OnDataAvailable), sender, e);
}
else
{
byte[] buffer = e.Buffer;
int bytesRecorded = e.BytesRecorded;
int bufferIncrement = waveIn.WaveFormat.BlockAlign;
for (int index = 0; index < bytesRecorded; index += bufferIncrement)
{
float sample32 = BitConverter.ToSingle(buffer, index);
sampleAggregator.Add(sample32);
}
}
}
void FftCalculated(object sender, FftEventArgs e)
{
// Do something with e.result!
}
And the Sample Aggregator class:
using NAudio.Dsp; // The Complex and FFT are here!
class SampleAggregator
{
// FFT
public event EventHandler<FftEventArgs> FftCalculated;
public bool PerformFFT { get; set; }
// This Complex is NAudio's own!
private Complex[] fftBuffer;
private FftEventArgs fftArgs;
private int fftPos;
private int fftLength;
private int m;
public SampleAggregator(int fftLength)
{
if (!IsPowerOfTwo(fftLength))
{
throw new ArgumentException("FFT Length must be a power of two");
}
this.m = (int)Math.Log(fftLength, 2.0);
this.fftLength = fftLength;
this.fftBuffer = new Complex[fftLength];
this.fftArgs = new FftEventArgs(fftBuffer);
}
bool IsPowerOfTwo(int x)
{
return (x & (x - 1)) == 0;
}
public void Add(float value)
{
if (PerformFFT && FftCalculated != null)
{
// Remember the window function! There are many others as well.
fftBuffer[fftPos].X = (float)(value * FastFourierTransform.HammingWindow(fftPos, fftLength));
fftBuffer[fftPos].Y = 0; // This is always zero with audio.
fftPos++;
if (fftPos >= fftLength)
{
fftPos = 0;
FastFourierTransform.FFT(true, m, fftBuffer);
FftCalculated(this, fftArgs);
}
}
}
}
public class FftEventArgs : EventArgs
{
[DebuggerStepThrough]
public FftEventArgs(Complex[] result)
{
this.Result = result;
}
public Complex[] Result { get; private set; }
}
And that is it I think. I might have missed something though.
Hope this helps!
I'm trying to write a mini synth program. Essentially, every 200mS a timer is fired. When this is fired, 200mS worth of PCM samples are generated by the loop (e.g. sawtooth, sine wave etc, etc.), the number of samples related to the sample rate and scan period. e.g. every 200mS, 4000 samples are ready in the wave array for playing. My question is, how do I play this array i.e.what should the PlaySound method do? Invoking PlaySound every 200mS should play subsequent samples in a continuous manner. I have played around with DirectSound and NAudio to no avail.
const int SAMPLE_RATE = 20000;
const double SCAN_PERIOD = .2; // S
Timer _ScanTimer = new Timer();
double[] wave = new double[(int)((double)SAMPLE_RATE * SCAN_PERIOD)];
_ScanTimer.Tick += new EventHandler(_ScanTimer_Tick);
private void _ScanTimer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e) {
int numSamplesPerTick = (int)((double)SAMPLE_RATE * SCAN_PERIOD);
double secondsPerTick = (double)2 / SAMPLE_RATE;
for (int i = 0; i < numSamplesPerTick; i++) {
wave[i] = GetSynthOutput();
_CurrentTime += secondsPerTick;
if (_CurrentTime > double.MaxValue - 1)
_CurrentTime = 0;
}
PlaySound(wave);
}
I realise that the timer may not fire exactly every 200mS, and that the 4000 samples may contain slightly too few or too many samples for the actual time. I'm not worried about this as I can tweak the number of samples according to the actual time between subsequent timer firing.
Instead of creating sound on a timer, most audio synthesis programs work with two buffers - one is being filled while the other one is being played. NAudio allows you to do this by implementing the Read function in an ISampleProvider or IWaveProvider derived class. This method will be called whenever the soundcard wants more audio to play. You can set up your buffer sizes to be 200ms if you want.