How to find peaks in 3d mesh?

Hi, I have a mesh made from data ([Y,X] matrix and Z values) and I would like to find the peaks and report their position. How can I do it?

 Accepted Answer

Mike Garrity
Mike Garrity on 6 Apr 2016
Edited: Mike Garrity on 6 Apr 2016
If your X & Y are monotone, and you have the Image Processing Toolbox, then the imregionalmax function is pretty robust. It handles all of the special cases like flat regions.
[x,y] = meshgrid(linspace(-3,3,10));
z = 10*ones(10,10);
z(2:4,2:4) = 22;
z(6:8,6:8) = 33;
z(2,7) = 44;
z(3,8) = 45;
z(4,9) = 44
surf(x,y,z,'FaceColor','interp')
ix = find(imregionalmax(z));
hold on
plot3(x(ix),y(ix),z(ix),'r*','MarkerSize',24)

2 Comments

OldCar
OldCar on 6 Apr 2016
Edited: OldCar on 11 Apr 2016
I have a big set of values and it say that index exceeds matrix dimensions. What can I do?
You need to use the meshed X and Y. As in, fetched your ix indices from the meshed X and Y.

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More Answers (3)

Cristian Alistarh
Cristian Alistarh on 17 Jun 2020
Edited: Cristian Alistarh on 17 Jun 2020
I think you got this error:
Index exceeds the number of array elements
As stated above, you need to use the meshed X and Y.
Digging further into this, the indicies of the output of the imregionalmax function is given in linear array indicies and not 2D (row, columns) as one would normally expect. I had the same problem and another way to solve this is to use the convert linear indices to subscripts function ind2sub
ix = find(imregionalmax(z));
[a,b] = ind2sub(size(z),ix);
plot3(x_init(a),y_init(b),z(a,b),'r*','MarkerSize',24)
I am not sure if it will give you 100% what you are looking for, but explains the previous behaviour and another way on how to fix it.

5 Comments

Hello Cristian,
I have a 3D point cloud surface that is converted to a (n x 3) matrix (each row is a point location). I want to find all local exterma of this surface. Does your method work for this problem too?
Best,
M
Hi Memo Remo,
Yes, it does. By looking at the definition of imregionalmax you can see it accepts as input a numeric array of any dimension.
So you will have a set of 3 coordinates for each row, together with the value assgined for this coordiante. In total, 4 variables. You apply the the imregionalmax to the values themselves, which should give you what you want. So the code becomes:
ix = find(imregionalmax(z));
[a,b,c] = ind2sub(size(z),ix);
In my own code, I have defined the 3D positions based on theta, phi coordiantes and it works. I imagine that if you get into some trouble with using the cartesian coordinates, you can change to spherical and it should work.
Hope this helps,
Cristian
Memo Remo
Memo Remo on 18 Jun 2020
Edited: Memo Remo on 18 Jun 2020
Hi Cristian,
Thanks for your help.
Actually I have only the coordinates without any other values. Please consider that my (n x 3) data matrix only contains some points on the suface of a part of the earth including mountains and valleys. I need to find the peak of the mountains and bottom of the valleys. Attached is a sample of thses files. If I use the spherical coordinate then there sould be still three coordinates (r, phi and theta), is this correct?
Thanks,
M
OK, sounds better than my suggestion.

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Poison Idea fan
Poison Idea fan on 1 May 2024
Matlab 2024a has a new function islocalmax2 that can find peaks for 3D surface.
https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/islocalmax2.html#mw_ecf7d164-82f0-4175-b939-b61c0f9c7f29

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