SC - powerful image rendering

Useful tool for rendering and outputting information rich images

Description

SC is a useful function for displaying rich image data, of use to anyone wishing to visualize and save 2D data in ways beyond that which MATLAB built-in functions allow.

This function can be used in place of IMAGE, IMAGESC and IMSHOW, but does so much more. It is fast and displays images as they should be - correct aspect ratio, integer magnification, no axes. In addition, it can return the image as an output variable - useful for saving to disk, texture mapping surfaces, and post-rendering manipulation such as overlaying/combining two or more images.

All the MATLAB built-in colormaps are implemented, but without MATLAB's nasty discretization artifacts. Plus, there are many new colormaps which are helpful for viewing more complex data, such as optic flow, likelihoods over images, difference images, segmentations, stereo image pairs (as anaglyphs) and edge-maps with orientation. It also accepts user defined linear and non-linear colormaps.

SC comes with a complete demo, to help you get the most out of it. It doesn't require that you have any toolboxes, either.

SC makes heavy use of two of my other file exchange packages, IMDISP (id 22387) and REAL2RGB (id 23342), which are both included in this package, but are very useful in their own rights too.

Please send queries or bug reports direct to me using the "Contact Author" link on my Author page.

Acknowledgements

Imdisp and Real2rgb & Colormaps inspired this file.

This file inspired Zerocolor.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.0.1 (R14SP1)

[Julia]

Terrific

[SHAFIQUL]

 

[bella]

 

[Tao Han]

 

[Oliver Woodford]

Matthias: You can achieve that by setting the CurrentAxes property of the figure directly before calling SC. Alternatively, you can first draw the image in your GUI using IMAGE and save the image handle, then in the callbacks just set the CData property of the image using the output of SC. I do the latter, because it is faster at updating on screen.

[Matthias Geissbuehler]

Very nice framework! Works like a charm!
A little request which would make it even more useful: I would like to tell sc which axes-handle to use -> I would like to use it inside a GUI. is something like this imaginable? Or is sc not going to have enough flexibility in such a manner, since the axis position (&size) are going to be fixed? Any thoughts on this?

[Salmah Yasiran]

Nice one!!

[Fabian]

 

[Rafa]

 

[Magnus]

This is something of a stretch, but have you considered adding support for displaying CMYK-images? Otherwise, I love this function

[Oliver Woodford]

bmv: This is a problem with lipsol - any MATLAB function should be able to cope with the possibility sharing variable names with the names of functions on the path. I suggest you email the author, or fix it yourself.

[bmv]

The name sc clashes with the Matlab file:

??? Error: File: lipsol.m Line: 987 Column: 7
"sc" previously appeared to be used as a function or command, conflicting with its use here as the name
of a variable.
A possible cause of this error is that you forgot to initialize the
variable, or you have initialized it implicitly using load or eval.

[Harald Mayr]

 

[Qianqian]

Sorry, I have seen all the demos. This is a great tool.

[Qianqian]

This is great. Just what I want. Would you please post an example here, which will make things easier for the user? Thank you very much. :)

[Oliver Woodford]

A note to all: SC only fills the figure completely with an image if the current axes is the default size. Therefore to avoid this behaviour, change the size of the axes first, e.g.:
set(gca, 'Position', [0.1 0.1 0.8 0.8]);
sc(peaks(128));

[Brent Boehlert]

Oliver: I sent you an email with an example. Let me know if you didn't receive it and I'll post it here.

[Oliver Woodford]

Brent: For help on this, please email me with an example figure and and print command.

[Brent Boehlert]

Hello Oliver,
Excellent work on this function. I have one issue -- when I print a figure to a .tif or .pdf, the colorbar labels on the right don't show up. If I move the outerposition of the figure over, they do, but then the left side of the image is cut off. Any thoughts on how to get the colorbar labels on my printed figure?

[Oliver Woodford]

Camille: I think it's unlikely.

[Camille Couzi]

Hi, I left a message and it wasn't saved...
I sthat possible that nexplot property with replacechildren argument don't work for the same reason as the one told by Dove (and your answer about RGB images...)

[Oliver Woodford]

Dove: CAXIS only works on indexed images. The images generated by SC are RGB images (for various good reasons). There is an alternative - specify the range bounds in the call to SC. It's in the help text ("limits" argument).

[Dove]

Hi Oliver,

I found that caxis is not working. Is there an alternative?

[Oliver Woodford]

Camille: No. The tick functionality is the same as that of image. I suggest you contact the author of that submission to request support for images.

[Camille Couzi]

Hi! Is that possible to fix dateticks on this kind of image? I would need to apply dynamic date ticks (see http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/27075-intelligent-dynamic-date-ticks, wich works on plot, but apparently not on imagesc and sc...
Thanks for reply!
Camille.

[Oliver Woodford]

Patrik: SC draws the image into the current axes as a standard MATLAB image object. However, it doesn't return the handle of the image. You can get the handle either by using IMSC (which behaves more like MATLAB's IMAGESC) or by using FINDOBJ. If you use the correct handle this should work.

[patrik]

Great function. I have one problem though; i want the user of my gui to be able to click in the figure a have drawn with SC and recieve pixel coordinates. However when I try to add a buttondownfunction by writing
set(sc_handle,'ButtonDownFcn',@get_pixel_value) i get an error;
Error using set. Invalid handle.
Does an sc-object not have the property ButtonDownFcn or what am I doing wrong?

Thanks

[Oliver Woodford]

C. Chaya & Justin: I've now included alternative to SC (called IMSC) which is the same as SC but with the display behaviour of IMAGESC, i.e. shows axes, variable aspect ratio etc.

[Oliver Woodford]

Camille:
axis on

[Camille Couzi]

How can I set XTick, YTick, XTickLabel and YTickLabel VISBLE as they are not handle of the text object (as is Title for Example)?
Writting :
set(get(gca, 'XTickLabel'), 'Visible', 'on');

sends an error:
??? Error using ==> set
Value must be a handle

Error in ==> ploteo_postfiltrado at 56
set(get(gca, 'XTickLabel'), 'Visible', 'on');
...

Thanks a lot for the help :-)

[Alize]

 

[K E]

Helpful, thanks

[Ange]

 

[Oliver Woodford]

Justin - if you prefer the image displaying properties of imagesc I suggest you use image(sc(X)). However, you then don't get the correct colorbar. If it's just the aspect ratio you don't like then call set(gca, 'DataAspectRatioMode', 'auto') after sc.

[Justin]

The autopreservation of aspect ratio (mentioned by http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/authors/27420) is the only thing I don't like about sc If I have a very long narrow matrix, imagesc scales it to display it in a standard sized matlab window. sc on the other hand gives me an extremely long narrow window. If there's an easy way to disable this please let me know.

Otherwise it's great.

[Jun wan]

veri nice .bue i didn't try it

[Idillus]

Nice

[Yair Altman]

Extremely well done: excellent documentation, very instructive online demo (look at its code: so clean and compact!), lots of boundary-condition checks and clever packing of lots of options into a decievingly-simple interface. Some of this submission's defaults should have been imagesc's as well (for example, auto preservation of aspect ratio & axes elimination, not to mention the discretization issues). I love it!

[Oliver Woodford]

The problem with not displaying titles and axis labels has now been fixed, thanks to C. Chaya's suggestion.

[Oliver Woodford]

Removing the axes is a "feature" of the display side of this code. Unfortunately it does mean subplot titles and axes labels are hidden. This is something I've tried hard to avoid, but haven't found a way yet. You can use IMSHOW instead, but still get the benefits of SC, thus:
imshow(sc(X, 'jet'));

[C. Chaya]

Otherwise, an excellent job. would give it 4.5 stars if the rating system would let me.

[C. Chaya]

Doesn't show subplot titles. Must use

set(get(gca, 'Title'), 'Visible', 'on'); as a workaround.

[Andrew]

Perfect. I used it to get around the fact that Matlab only allows one colormap per figure axis, and with some trial and error I even got the colorbar I wanted to show up. Great work Oliver.

[M HEMA NITHYA]

 

[Ernesto Moya]

It's great.

[Ross McGurk]

Finally found a relatively simple tool for overlaying some deformation maps on a binary image.
Took me about half an hour to get it to do what I was hoping it would (and this was helped due one of the examples in the demo).

Thanks very much for making this available!

[Felix Hebeler]

Excellent package, saved my day! Great support too! Highly recommended...

[p p]

best viewing code ever

[John Henkel]

This is a pretty good package. I was just about to resort to either Zedgraph or Python to make some really pretty contour graphs (gotta pull out all the stops to get more funding. =P ), and ran across this. Very nice, and easy to use. The demo is a neat feature.