3D scatterplot colored by Z-Value - matlab

I've been googling for a while but couldn't find a solution for my problem. I am an amateur matlab user and I would like to create a 3D scatterplot, for this I have a matrix containing several points in 3D space:
>> size(A)
ans =
2511 3
I was able to create a 3D scatterplot using "scatter3" function, but now I am stuck a bit at color-coding the 3D points.
scatter3(A(:,1),A(:,2),A(:,3));
This will plot the data, but now I would like to add a color coding based on the z-Value...
The colors themself don't matter too much. It could be a rainbow spectrum or a temperature spectrum or whatever. I just would like to colorcode them to distinguish the z-Values of the points.
Can anybody help me with this? Thank you!

You have to give some more arguments to scatter3.
scatter3(X,Y,Z,S,C);
S lets you specify areas for each markers (with a vector) or a single area for all the markers, while C lets you specify color. If C is a vector, its values will be linearly mapped to the current colormap. To change the colormap, call colormap(jet) for example. See the documentation on colormap.
Sorry if that's confusing. Short version:
scatter3(A(:,1),A(:,2),A(:,3),9,A(:,3));
colormap(jet); %# or other colormap

Related

Matlab or Origin - Combining two sets of 3D data in one contour plot

I have two sets of 3D data with XYZ coordinates. I would like to know if there is a program that can combine the two, such that:
One set of data is represented by the colours of the plot, and the other set of data is represented by the height (in 3D) of the plot.
I am familiar with both Matlab and Origin.
Can be done with surf(Z,C).
a = randi(20,20,20);
b = randi(20,20,20);
figure;
subplot(2,2,1);
surf(a);
title('Height');
subplot(2,2,2);
surf(b);
title('Color');
subplot(2,2,[3,4]);
surf(a,b);
title('Mixed');
Not the best representations but you can see one matrix yields height and one yields color.
Color of mixed plot comes from right plot
Height of mixed plot comes from left plot
It is easy if you use scatter3 function.
w=100;
x1=rand(1,w);
y1=rand(1,w);
z1=rand(1,w)*100;
z2=ceil(rand(1,w)*255);
figure
h=scatter3(x1,y1,z1,ones(1,w)*50,z2,'filled');

Making an accurate colorbar for a simple plot

I am trying to make a simple plot (for this example doing a plot of y=x^2 will suffice) where I want to set the colors of the points based on their magnitude given some colormap.
Following along my simple example say I had:
x = 1:10;
y = x.^2;
Use gscatter(x,y,jet(10)); legend hide; colorbar which produces a plot with the points colored but the colorbar does not agree with the colored values. (Can't post picture as this is my first post). Using a caxis([1,100]) command gives the right range but the colors are still off.
So I have two questions:
(1) How can I fix the colors to fit to a colorbar given a range? In my real data, I am looking at values that range from -50 to 50 in some instances and have many more data points.
(2) I want to create a different plot with the same points (but on different axes) and I want the colors of each point on this new plot to have the same colors as their counterparts in the previous plot. How can I, programmatically, extract the color from each point so I can plot it on two different sets of axes?
I would just move the points into a matrix and do an imagesc() command but they aren't spaced as integers or equally so simple scaling wouldn't work either.
Thanks for any help!
Regarding you first question, you need to interpolate the y values into a linear index to the colormap. Something like:
x = 1:10;
y = x.^4;
csize = 128;
cmap = jet(csize);
ind = interp1(linspace(min(y),max(y),csize),1:csize,y,'nearest');
scatter(x,y,14,cmap(ind,:),'filled')
colorbar
caxis([min(y) max(y)])
Using interp1 in this case is an overkill; you could calculate it directly. However, I think in this way it is clearer.
I think it also answers your 2nd question, since you have the index of the color of each data point, so you can use it again in the same way.

Plot 3D surface that is not the graph of a function

I have a 3D data set of a surface that is not a function graph. The data is just a bunch of points in 3D, and the only thing I could think of was to try scatter3 in Matlab. Surf will not work since the surface is not a function graph.
Using scatter3 gave a not so ideal result since there is no perspective/shading of any sort.
Any thoughts? It does not have to be Matlab, but that is my go-to source for plotting.
To get an idea of the type of surface I have, consider the four images:
The first is a 3D contour plot, the second is a slice in a plane {z = 1.8} of the contour. My goal is to pick up all the red areas. I have a method to do this for each slice {z = k}. This is the 3rd plot, and I like what I see here a lot.
Iterating this over z give will give a surface, which is the 4th plot, which is a bit noisy (though I have ideas to reduce the noise...). If I plot just the black surface using scatter3 without the contour all I get is a black indistinguishable blob, but for every slice I get a smooth curve, and I have noticed that the curves vary pretty smoothly when I adjust z.
Some fine-tuning will give a much better 4th plot, but still, even if I get the 4th plot to have no noise at all, the result using scatter3 will be a black incomprehensible blob when plotted alone and not on top of the 3D contour. I would like to get a nice picture of the full surface that is not plotted on top of the 3D contour plot
In fact, just to compare and show how bad scatter3 is for surfaces, even if you had exact points on a sphere and used scatter3 the result would be a black blob, and wouldn't even look like a sphere
Can POV-Ray handle this? I've never used it...
If you have a triangulation of your points, you could consider using the trisurf function. I have used that before to generate closed surfaces that have no boundary (such as polyhedra and spheres). The downside is that you have to generate a triangulation of your points. This may not be ideal to your needs but it definitely an option.
EDIT: As #High Performance Mark suggests, you could try using delaunay to generate a triangulation in Matlab
just wanted to follow up on this question. A quick nice way to do this in Matlab is the following:
Consider the function d(x, y, z) defined as the minimum distance from (x, y, z) to your data set. Make sure d(x, y, z) is defined on some grid that contains the data set you're trying to plot.
Then use isosurface to plot a (some) countour(s) of d(x, y, z). For me plotting the contour 0.1 of d(x, y ,z) was enough: Matlab will plot a nice looking surface of all points within a distance 0.1 of the data set with good lighting and all.
In povray, a blob object could be used to display a very dense collection of points, if you make them centers of spheres.
http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/71/
If you want to be able to make slices of "space" and have them colored as per your data, then maybe the object pattern (based on a #declared blob object) might do the trick.
Povray also has a way to work with df3 files, which I've never worked with, but this user appears to have done something similar to your visualization.
http://paulbourke.net/miscellaneous/df3/

Matlab 3d plot of indexed data

I am trying to plot a 3d view of a very large CT dataset. My data is in a 3d matrix of 2000x2000x1000 dimension. The object is surrounded by air, which is set to NaN in my matrix.
I would like to be able to see the greyscale value of the surface of the object (no isosurface) but I cannot quite work out how to do that in Matlab. Can anyone help me please?
Given that I a dealing with a huge matrix and I am only interested in the surface of the object, does anyone know a good trick how to reduce the size of my dataset?
The function surf(X,Y,Z) allows you to plot 3d data, where (X,Y) gives the coordinates in the x-y-plane while Z gives the z-coordinate and the surface color.
By default the function does not plot anything for the NaN entries, so you should be good to go with the surf function.
To set the surf-function to use a grayscale plotting use:
surf(matrix3d);
colormap(gray);
This plots the matrix in a surface plot and sets the colormap to grayscale.
In addition, as I understand your data, you might be able to eliminate entire plane-segments in your matrix. If for instance the plane A(1,1:2000,1:1000) is NaN in all entries you could eliminate all those entries (thus the entire Y,Z-plane in entry X=1). This will however require some heavy for loops, which might be over the top. This depends on how many data matrices you have compared to how many different plot you want for each matrix.
I will try to give you some ideas. I assume lack of a direct 3D "surface detector".
Since you have a 3D matrix where XY-planes are CT scan slices and each slice is an image, I would try to find edges of each slice say with edge. This would require some preprocessing like first thresholding each slice image. Then I can either use scatter3 to display the edge data as a 3D point cloud or delaunay3 to display the edge data as a surface.
I hope this will help you achieve what you are asking for.
I managed to get it working:
function [X,Y,Z,C] = extract_surface(file_name,slice_number,voxel_size)
LT = imread(file_name);%..READ THE 2D MAP
BW = im2bw(LT,1);%..THRESHOLD TO BINARY
B = bwboundaries(BW,8,'noholes');%..FIND THE OUTLINE OF THE IMAGE
X = B{1}(:,1);%..EXTRACT X AND Y COORDINATES
Y = B{1}(:,2);
indices = sub2ind(size(LT),X,Y);%..FIND THE CORRESPONDING LINEAR INDICES
C = LT(indices);%..NOW READ THE VALUES AT THE OUTLINE POSITION
Z = ones(size(X))*slice_number;
I can then plot this with
figure
scatter3(X,Y,Z,2,C)
Now the only thing I could improve is to have all these points in the scatter plot connected with a surface. #upperBound you suggested delaunay3 for this purpose - I cannot quite figure out how to do this. Do you have a tip?

Plotting 3-D Matrix *values* in MATLAB

I have a 3D Matrix M(256x256x136) and each index(i,j,k) in M has a gray level value in it. I am interested in displaying M in some sort of a 3D plot in MATLAB, but am unable to do so. I cannot use plot3 because plot3 is for plotting points, not the values.
Thanks
If I understand your question correctly, you want to plot the 3D point cloud with i,j, and k as 3D coordinates and the gray level as the point value.
I would suggest using scatter3.
Sounds like you are looking for a volume renderer. For Matlab, you could try this one: Volume Render from Matlab Central
An isosurface plot might be useful as well.