camerakit/blurkit-android

BlurKit is an Android library that makes it easy to add real-time blur effects to parts of your app's screen. It works similarly to the frosted glass effect common on iOS, where a floating panel shows a blurred version of whatever is behind it. BlurKit brings that same kind of live background blurring to Android apps. The main component is BlurLayout, a view you add to your XML layout file just like a button or image. Once wired up in your Activity code, it continuously captures and blurs whatever content sits behind it in real time. You control how strongly things are blurred with a radius setting, and you control the frame rate. If the content behind the blur rarely changes, you can set the frame rate to zero and manually refresh only when needed, which saves battery and CPU time. Performance is a stated priority. The README includes benchmark numbers comparing BlurKit against a generic blurring approach. BlurKit retrieves and blurs a 300 by 100 dp region in about 1 to 2 milliseconds per step, compared to 8 to 50 milliseconds for the unoptimized approach. This is achieved by downscaling the captured bitmap before blurring it, since blurring a smaller image and scaling it back up is much faster than blurring at full resolution and produces visually similar results. Beyond the layout component, the library also exposes a BlurKit class you can use directly to blur any View or Bitmap by passing it a radius value. A fastBlur method adds the downscale optimization for view blurring specifically. Setup requires adding one line to your app's build.gradle dependencies block. The library is MIT licensed and is a companion project to CameraKit, another Android library from the same team. The README lists a few planned features that were not yet complete at the time of writing, including support for SurfaceView and use inside dialog windows.