How to connect a 3D points with a distance threshold Matlab - matlab

Question

I have a vector of 3D points lets say A as shown below,
A=[
-0.240265581092000 0.0500598627544876 1.20715641293013
-0.344503191645519 0.390376667574812 1.15887540716612
-0.0931248606994074 0.267137193112796 1.24244644549763
-0.183530493218807 0.384249186312578 1.14512014134276
-0.0201358671977785 0.404732019283683 1.21816745283019
-0.242108038906952 0.229873488902244 1.24229940627651
-0.391349107031230 0.262170158259873 1.23856838565023
]
what I want to do is to connect 3D points with lines which only have distance less than a specific threshold T. I want to get a list of pairs of points needed to be connected. Such as,
[
( -0.240265581092000 0.0500598627544876 1.20715641293013), (-0.344503191645519 0.390376667574812 1.15887540716612);
(-0.0931248606994074 0.267137193112796 1.24244644549763),(-0.183530493218807 0.384249186312578 1.14512014134276),.....
]
So as shown, I'll have a vector of pairs of points needed to be connected. So if anyone could please advise how this can be done in Matlab.

Answer 1

The following example demonstrates how to accomplish this.
%# Build an example matrix
A = [1 2 3; 0 0 0; 3 1 3; 2 0 2; 0 1 0];
Threshold = 3;
%# Calculate distance between all points
D = pdist2(A, A);
%# Discard any points with distance greater than threshold
D(D > Threshold) = nan;
If you wish to extract an index of all observation pairs that are linked by a distance less than (or equal to) Threshold, as well as the corresponding distance (your question didn't specify what form you wanted the output to take, so I am essentially guessing here), then instead use the following:
%# Obtain a list of linear indices of observations less than or equal to TH
I1 = find(D <= Threshold);
%#Extract the actual distances, as well as the corresponding observation indices from A
[Obs1Index, Obs2Index] = ind2sub(size(D), I1);
DList = [Obs1Index, Obs2Index, D(I1)];
Note, pdist2 uses Euclidean distance by default, but there are other options - see the documentation here.
UPDATE: Based on the OP's comments, the following code will express the output as a K*6 matrix, where K is the number of distance measures less than the threshold value, and the first three columns of each row is the first data point (3 dimensions) and the second three columns of each row is the connected data point.
DList2 = [A(Obs1Index, :), A(Obs2Index, :)];
SECOND UPDATE: I have not made any assumptions on the distance measure in this answer. That is, I'm deliberately using pdist2 in case your distance measure is not symmetric. However, if you are using a symmetric distance measure, then you could probably speed up the run-time by using pdist instead, although my indexing code would need to be adjusted accordingly.

Answer 2

Plot3 and pdist2 can be used to achieve what you want.
D=pdist2(A,A);
T=0.2;
for i=1:7
for j=i+1:7
if D(i,j)<T & D(i,j)~=0
i
j
plot3(A([i j],1),A([i j],2),A([i j],3));
hold on;
fprintf('line is plotted\n');
pause;
end
end
end