ImageFormat

Encoded formats. These are not necessarily supported by the hardware.

YCbCr format, used for video. Whether this format is supported by the camera hardware can be determined by getSupportedPreviewFormats().

YCrCb format used for images, which uses the NV21 encoding format. This is the default format for camera preview images, when not otherwise set with setPreviewFormat(int).

RGB format used for pictures encoded as RGB_565. See setPictureFormat(int).

Multi-plane Android YUV format

This format is a generic YCbCr format, capable of describing any 4:2:0 chroma-subsampled planar or semiplanar buffer (but not fully interleaved), with 8 bits per color sample.

Images in this format are always represented by three separate buffers of data, one for each color plane. Additional information always accompanies the buffers, describing the row stride and the pixel stride for each plane.

The order of planes in the array returned by Image#getPlanes() is guaranteed such that plane #0 is always Y, plane #1 is always U (Cb), and plane #2 is always V (Cr).

The Y-plane is guaranteed not to be interleaved with the U/V planes (in particular, pixel stride is always 1 in yPlane.getPixelStride()).

The U/V planes are guaranteed to have the same row stride and pixel stride (in particular, uPlane.getRowStride() == vPlane.getRowStride() and uPlane.getPixelStride() == vPlane.getPixelStride(); ).

YCbCr format used for images, which uses YUYV (YUY2) encoding format. This is an alternative format for camera preview images. Whether this format is supported by the camera hardware can be determined by getSupportedPreviewFormats().

Android YUV format.

This format is exposed to software decoders and applications.

YV12 is a 4:2:0 YCrCb planar format comprised of a WxH Y plane followed by (W/2) x (H/2) Cr and Cb planes.

This format assumes

• an even width
• an even height
• a horizontal stride multiple of 16 pixels
• a vertical stride equal to the height

 y_size = stride * height
 c_stride = ALIGN(stride/2, 16)
 c_size = c_stride * height/2
 size = y_size + c_size * 2
 cr_offset = y_size
 cb_offset = y_size + c_size

This format is guaranteed to be supported for camera preview images since API level 12; for earlier API versions, check getSupportedPreviewFormats().

Note that for camera preview callback use (see setPreviewCallback(Camera.PreviewCallback)), the stride value is the smallest possible; that is, it is equal to:

stride = ALIGN(width, 16)

Use this function to retrieve the number of bits per pixel of an ImageFormat.