I forgot to blog about this last week, but Justin made me remember. The WebRTC getUserMedia API is available on the Nightly and Aurora channels of Firefox right now and Tim has done a couple of great demos of using JavaScript to process the media stream. That got me interested and after a little playing around I remembered learning the basics of convolution image filters so I thought I’d give it a try. The result is a sorta ugly-looking UI that lets you build your own image filters to apply to the video coming off your webcam. There are a few pre-defined filter matrices there to get you started and it’s interesting to see what effects you can get. Remember that you need to enable media.navigator.enabled in about:config to make it work.

The downside is that either through me not seeing an obvious optimisation or JS just being too slow right now it isn’t fast enough for real use. Even a simple 3×3 filter is too slow on my machine since it ends up having to do 9 calculations per pixel which is just too much. Can someone out there make it faster?

Update: The ever-awesome bz took a look and pointed out three quick fixes that made the code far faster and it now runs almost realtime with a 3×3 filter for me. First he pointed out that storing frame.data in a variable outside the loops rather than resolving it each time speeds things up a lot. Secondly apparently let isn’t fully supported by IonMonkey yet so it switches to a slower path when it encounters it. Finally I was manually clamping the result to 0-255 but pixel data is a Uint8ClampedArray so it clamps itself automatically.