How can I traverse through pixels? - matlab

Question

Suppose, I have the following image in my hand.
I have marked some pixels of the image as follows,
Now, I have obtained the pixel mask,
How can I traverse through only those pixels that are in that mask?

Answer 1

Given a binary mask, mask, where you want to iterate over all the true pixels in mask, you have at least two options that are both better than the double for loop example.
1) Logical indexing.
I(mask) = 255;
2) Use find.
linearIdx = find(mask);
I(linearIdx) = 255;

Answer 2

The original question:
How can I save only those pixels which I am interested in?
...
Question: Now, in the Step#2, I want to save those pixels in a data-structure (or, whatever) d so that I can apply another function f2(I, d, p,q,r) which does something on that image on the basis of those pixels d.
Create a binary mask
Try using a logical mask of the image to keep track of the pixels of interest.
I'll make up a random image for example here:
randImg = rand(64,64,3);
imgMask = false(size(randImg(:,:,1)));
imgMask(:,[1:4:end]) = true; % take every four columns This would be your d.
% Show what we are talking about
maskImg = zeros(size(randImg));
imgMaskForRGB = repmat(imgMask,1,1,3);
maskImg(imgMaskForRGB) = randImg(imgMaskForRGB);
figure('name','Psychadelic');
subplot(2,1,1);
imagesc(randImg);
title('Random image');
subplot(2,1,2);
imagesc(maskImg);
title('Masked pixels of interest');
Here's what it looks like:
It will be up to you to determine how to store and use the image mask (d in your case) as I am not sure how your functions are written. Hopefully this example will give you an understanding of how it can be done though.
EDIT
You added a second question since I posted:
But, now the problem is, how am I going to traverse through those pixels in K?
Vectrorization
To set all pixels to white:
randImg(imgMaskForRGB) = 255;
In my example, I accessed all of the pixels of interest at the same time with my mask in a vectorized fashion.
I translated my 2D mask into a 3D mask, in order to grab the RGB values of each pixel. That was this code:
maskImg = zeros(size(randImg));
imgMaskForRGB = repmat(imgMask,1,1,3);
Then to access all of these pixels in the image of interest, I used this call:
randImg(imgMaskForRGB)
These are your pixels of interest. If you want to divide these values in 1/2 you could do something like this:
randImg(imgMaskForRGB) = randImg(imgMaskForRGB)/2;
Loops
If you really want to traverse, one pixel at a time, you can always use a double for loop:
for r=1:size(randImg,1)
for c=1:size(randImg,2)
if(imgMask(r,c)) % traverse all the pixels
curPixel = randImg(r,c,:); % grab the ones that are flagged
end
end
end

Answer 3

Okay. I have solved this using the answer of #informaton,
I = imread('gray_bear.png');
J = rgb2gray(imread('marked_bear.png'));
mask = I-J;
for r=1:size(I,1)
for c=1:size(I,2)
if(mask(r,c))
I(r,c) = 255;
end
end
end
imshow(I);