Converting char* to cv::Mat in NDK Android studio

Question

I have a native C++ method, which I am using to read an image called "hi.jpg". The code below finds the asset, and loads the data into a char* buffer. (I've tried other methods such as imread() and the file is not found). I would then like to change this data into Mat format, so I've followed some instructions to put the char* buffer into std::vector , and then use cv::imdecode to convert the data to Mat.

JNIEXPORT jint JNICALL Java_com_example_user_application_MainActivity_generateAssets(JNIEnv* env,jobject thiz,jobject assetManager) {

AAsset* img;

AAssetManager *mgr = AAssetManager_fromJava(env, assetManager);
AAssetDir* assetDir = AAssetManager_openDir(mgr, "");
const char* filename;

while ((filename = AAssetDir_getNextFileName(assetDir)) != NULL) {
    AAsset *asset = AAssetManager_open(mgr, filename, AASSET_MODE_UNKNOWN);

    if(strcmp(filename, "hi.jpg")==0 ) {
        img = asset;
    }
}

long sizeOfImg = AAsset_getLength(img);
char* buffer = (char*) malloc (sizeof(char)*sizeOfImg);
AAsset_read(img, buffer, sizeOfImg);

std::vector<char> data(buffer, buffer + strlen(buffer));

cv::Mat dataToMat = cv::imdecode(data, IMREAD_UNCHANGED);


return 0;
}

My problem is that I don't know how to test that the data has been successfully converted into Mat. How can I test this? I have ran the debugger and inspected dataToMat, but it isn't making much sense.