Max function working for a sample of images but not all

I have a multidimensional matrix and I want to find the position of the maximum.

So naturally, I used [~,idx]=max(M,[],num)

where M is the matrix thats mxnxa and num is the dimension a.

This worked for a specific sample of images that I'm testing but doesn't work for others.

The code looks like this.

%% variables
% images is a 1xa cell array with an image in each cell
% checkDistance is a mxnxa matrix that represents the distance from the median to an image. 
% because i have 'a' images, checkDistance is 'a' dimensional.

dim=length(images);
[~, idx]=max(checkDistance,[],dim);

% idx should output a mxn matrix, not mxnxa
% doesn't really matter but this also applies to ~.

To reiterate, this ONLY works for a SPECIFIC sample of images. Could this be because of different filetypes? The sample that worked is .png and the one that didn't is .jpg...

EDIT1: made a set of samples that were jpg and worked. I'm starting to think there's an issue with the size of the image (1920x1280)

Any help is appreciated

Answer 1

[Bruno Luong]

Sato's example code

[~,idx]=max(A,[],7)

No the correct call is

[~,idx]=max(A,[],3)

You take the max along the third dimension. The number of elements in the third dimension (7) or length of A does not play any role in the calling parameters of MAX (Just think how you call MAX for A = 7 x 7 x 7).

[Sato Koyama]

ohhh. okay i get it now. thank you so much.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

length(images) is defined as:

if isempty(images)
    length <- 0
else
    length <- max(size(images))
end

You can see that it is not any particular dimension of the array. It could even end up being the number of images instead of the number of rows or columns.

[Sato Koyama]

Say that I have a mxnx7 (call it A) matrix, and i want to find the maximum elements across the 7 layers.

wouldn't the idx from [~,idx]=max(A,[],7) output an mxn matrix because the dimension is 7, thus enough to interpret that the the maximum value is found across the 7 mxn matrices?

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean... because i made it so that length(images) outputs the dimension 'a'.