imdisp

Display multiple images as a montage of subplots

Description

This function combines the functionality of IMAGE, IMAGESC, IMSHOW and MONTAGE.

In particular, it improves upon the MONTAGE function in the Image Processing Toolbox in these ways:
   - Image Processing Toolbox not required
   - Images are placed in subplots, so can be zoomed separately.
   - Small images are properly enlarged on screen.
   - Gaps can be placed between images.
   - Images can be viewed on a grid smaller than the number of images.
   - Surplus images can be viewed by scrolling through pages.
   - A directory of images can be viewed easily, by calling IMDISP with no arguments (a visual DIR).

To see two useful modes of operation try the following:

load mri
figure;
imdisp(D, bone(256));
figure;
imdisp(D, bone(256), 'Size', 1);

Use arrow keys to scroll through the image set with the single image.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.5 (R2007b)

[Francis Burton]

This function does exactly what I hoped and expected the original Image Processing Toolbox function to do, only much better and with some extra useful behavior - namely the ability to scroll through image sets. Mathworks could do worse than hire the author to write new, improved IPT functions.

[Image Analyst]

One note of warning. If you call this function from within your m-file code for your GUI, it will blow away everything on your GUI - it will not automatically pop up a new window. To avoid this, I simply put the lines
figure;
imdisp(montageCellArray, 'Border', [.01 .01]);
into my code. This will bring up a new blank figure (which will get replaced by the montage of images rather than my GUI.)
Looking forward to the captions....

[Image Analyst]

One note of warning. If you call this function from within your m-file code for your GUI, it will blow away everything on your GUI - it will not automatically pop up a new window. To avoid this, I simply put the lines
figure;
imdisp(montageCellArray, 'Border', [.01 .01]);
into my code. This will bring up a new blank figure (which will get replaced by the montage of images rather than my GUI.)

Secondly, I'd like to see the option of having the base file name as a caption on each image.

Third, it should do a better job of sizing the window. Mine pops up with the bottom edge under the Windows task bar, and tons of space on the right and left edge of the screen. Ideally there would be an option to size it to some fraction of the screen, such as 90% of the size in both x and y direction, or even fully maximized (no border).

[Oliver Woodford]

Displaying more than one image will clear the figure. Displaying a single figure will put it in the current axes.

The idea of having the filenames as captions is excellent, but there are a couple of issues that I can see which would significantly increase the complexity of the code, not least how and where to render the text so it is clearly visible, so I'm afraid I won't be doing it. I recommend someone giving it a try though.

Figure size is chosen to maximize image size of large images, or give integer magnification for small images (thus avoiding nearest-neighbour resizing artefacts). Layout is chosen to allow the largest image size possible. Note that this will not necessarily minimize the number of blank spaces. Both figure size and layout are based on the size of the first image. If you have an example of it doing a bad job please email me the images and test script.

[Shi vera]

oh,i think this is a good idea to write some functions that what we really need!

[Yaroslav Bulatov]

One gotcha is that one image in the grid can be rendered differently depending on other images in the array (related to scaling of intensity values perhaps?)