MATLAB Central Newsreader - Display an image in a 3d plot

Display an image in a 3d plot

David Doria — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:13:02 -0400

I was looking to make a demo of perspective projection, so I would like to move an image along the principal axis of a camera and resize it based on the focal length, and show how a 3d point gets projected along a ray. I saw this thread:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/155794

But it uses pcolor - so it would have to be a data set like 'clown', not an actual image. Is there no way to show something that you might show with imshow() but on a specific plane in 3d?

Thanks,
Dave

Re: Display an image in a 3d plot

Walter Roberson — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:34:20 -0400

David Doria wrote:

> Is there no way to show something that you might show with imshow() but on a specific plane in 3d?

No. image objects cannot have Z components.

Try this instead:

surf(Z*ones(size(TheImage)),TheImage,'EdgeColor','none')

where Z is the constant Z that you want for the image.

Re: Display an image in a 3d plot

Kenneth Eaton — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:48:02 -0400

You can also make a surface with a texture-mapped image:

surface('XData',[0 1; 0 1],'YData',[0 0; 1 1],...
'ZData',[1 1; 1 1],'CData',flipdim(imageData,1),...
'FaceColor','texturemap','EdgeColor','none');

where imageData is the image you want to display. You would just adjust the 'ZData' property of the surface to move it.

Ken

Re: Display an image in a 3d plot

David Doria — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:03:02 -0400

-------------
With the first method:

Z=5;
I = imread('ImagePlane.jpg');
surf(Z*ones(size(I)), I,'EdgeColor','none')

I get
Warning: Matrix dimensions must agree, not rendering mesh

-----------

Ken, perfect - that looks exactly like what I was looking for - I'll mess with it more and report back.

Dave

Re: Display an image in a 3d plot

Alexandro McQuillan — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:30:08 -0400

"David Doria" <daviddoria@gmail.com> wrote in message <gd5i9m$5j3$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> -------------
> With the first method:
>
> Z=5;
> I = imread('ImagePlane.jpg');
> surf(Z*ones(size(I)), I,'EdgeColor','none')
>
> I get
> Warning: Matrix dimensions must agree, not rendering mesh
>
> -----------
>
> Ken, perfect - that looks exactly like what I was looking for - I'll mess with it more and report back.
>
> Dave

Dave,

I'm also trying to import a tif image plane in 3D space. How did you resolve the matrix dimension mismatch issue?

Thanks,
Alex