In Android, Kotlin, TFLite blocks the UI thread when running in viewModelScope

Question

When viewModelScope executes, the UI is frozen and screen turns black. For some reason, this only happens when trying to process an image through my tflite model. Is this due to a memory/CPU problem in my emulator or because I am using an incorrect thread somehow?

 fun processImage(context: Context, bitmap: Bitmap) {
        viewModelScope.launch{
            ObjectRecognition.processImage(context, bitmap)
        }
    }

object ObjectRecognition {

    fun processImage(context : Context, bitmap : Bitmap) : List<DetectionResult>{
        val confidLevel = 0.3f

        // Step 1: Create TFLite's TensorImage object
        val image = TensorImage.fromBitmap(bitmap)

        // Step 2: Initialize the detector object
        val options = ObjectDetector.ObjectDetectorOptions.builder()
            .setMaxResults(5)
            .setScoreThreshold(confidLevel)
            .build()
        val detector = ObjectDetector.createFromFileAndOptions(
            context,
            "spade8_2.tflite",
            options
        )



        // Step 3: Feed given image to the detector
        val results = detector.detect(image)

        // Step 4: Parse the detection result and show it
        val resultToDisplay = results.map {
            // Get the top-1 category and craft the display text
            val category = it.categories.first()
            val text = "${category.label}, ${category.score.times(100).toInt()}%"

            // Create a data object to display the detection result

            DetectionResult(it.boundingBox, text)
        }
        Log.i(ContentValues.TAG, "result.. $resultToDisplay" )
        return resultToDisplay
    }
}