dynamic images for temporal dithering

I am trying to test temporal dithering to increase the color depth of my monitor. I dont want to use third party software such as Psychotoolbox, MEX, or other external stuff.

Is there any way to create dynamic temporal images of short duration, like gifs, that can be ploted by MATLAB, without using infinite loops or other blocking routines? I don't want these loops to block my GUI runtime.

Does MATLAB support async programming? Is it a good idea to use it for this purpose? Any ideas?

Answer 1

[Tejas]

Hello André,

To create dynamic temporal images, use the Axes UI component to plot the images. Then use 'timer' function to execute a function at regular intervals, to update those images.

Follow the below-mentioned steps to create dynamic temporal images using App Designer:

• Add an Axes component to the UI, which will be used to plot the images.
• Create a private property named ‘Timer’.

    properties (Access = private) 
        Timer  
    end 

• Add a ‘startupFcn’ callback for the app. This callback will define the properties of the ‘timer’ object and call the ‘updateImage’ function at regular intervals.

    function startupFcn(app) 
        app.Timer = timer('ExecutionMode', 'fixedRate', 'Period', 0.1, ... 
            'TimerFcn', @(~,~) updateImage(app)); 
        start(app.Timer); 
    end 

• Add the ‘updateImage’ function as a private method.

    function updateImage(app, ~, ~) 
        imgSize = [100, 100, 3]; 
        newImgData = rand(imgSize); 
        imagesc(app.UIAxes, newImgData); 
        axis(app.UIAxes, 'off'); 
    end 

• Finally, add the ‘UIFigureCloseRequest’ callback to the app to stop the timer when the app is closed.

    function UIFigureCloseRequest(app, event) 
        stop(app.Timer); 
        delete(app.Timer); 
        delete(app)            
    end 

Kindly refer to the following documentation to know more on 'timer' function:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/timer.html .