IntPtr to byte[] without copy

let's say I have an IntPtr that points to the raw data of System.Drawing.Bitmap. is there any way to create a byte array from that IntPtr without copying the data? I'm a pretty experienced C++ programmer, so I can call ToPointer() on it and convert to a byte* to work with it as a pointer, which is no big deal for me, but using a pointer and doing pointer arithmetic increases the risk of bugs, so I'd prefer not to do it that way if there's another way.

I admit, I do my very best to avoid C#, but isn't this exact situation the only reason the `Marshal' class has those copy interfaces?

Soma

that's certainly true, but I'm trying to write a pure-C# implementation of a video codec, which needs to run pretty fast (near real time). it seems to me that copying the array would cause a pretty significant performance hit. dealing with a raw pointer isn't especially dangerous in this case, because the only thing I'm doing with the data is to find the average value of all the bytes (crude average brightness), but if I can avoid using raw pointers in C#, that would be preferred.

O_o

I can't help but think you are going about it the wrong way. Depending on the color space and representation that isn't just crude but horribly wrong or pointlessly expensive.

If you can tell me, why are you "guestimating" the brightness? Are you estimating the brightness so that you might better decide which filters to use for processing? Planning to reduce average brightness for eventual movement estimation?

I don't know C# well enough to know if it is an option, but calculating a packed average is a thing that can be done with "SSE" or friends.

*shrug*

Well, anyway, I obviously can't help with the C# so I'll stop talking.

Soma

unfortunately, SSE isn't a real option from within a pure C# program, unless the JIT compiler is smart enough to use SSE for certain types of loops.