Hello MediaPipe on Android

MediaPipe is an open source project by Google AI and it enables developers to build real time cross-platform apps for mobile (Android & iOS), desktop and Corel Edge TPU. I heard about MediaPipe recently so I installed it to try out its Android sample apps.

The MediaPipe documentation is excellent; however since it’s cross-platform, I had to parse through the doc to figure out the end to end process for Android. So in this blog post, I’m sharing the steps I took for building the MediaPipe Android “Hello World” example app — a realtime edge detection app running with GPU.

I’m on a Mac with Android Studio 3.5.3. and followed MediaPipe documentation for these steps:

• Install MediaPipe on macOS (link to doc)
• Setting up Android SDK and NDK (link to doc)
• Using MediaPipe with Bazel (link to doc)

There are quite a few installations and configurations. Some installation steps take a while. While waiting, I read about the blog post (On-Device, Real-Time Hand Tracking with MediaPipe) and paper listed on the MediaPipe GitHub main page, and browse through the various example code for Android.

Install MediaPipe on macOS

I followed the exact instructions from the documentation to install MediaPipe and dependencies: