Finding coordinates of a rectangle in a picture

I'm running an eyetracking experiment. I display an image using the Screen function from psychtoolbox and I want to know the coordinates of some of the items displayed in the picture. Is there a way of drawing a rectangle on the positions you want to find the location of? Or is there another way of doing it? Thanks.

Answer 1

[KSSV]

You can draw rectangle using imrect.

doc imrect.

You can interactively pick the coordinates from the plot/ figure using ginput().

doc ginput.

[Alice]

Do you know if it is possible to use ginput() while running Screen?

[KSSV]

You have to write this ginput, when you want to seek the coordinates....in the code.

[Image Analyst]

Is the screen function something that runs and waits for user input, or does it just display the image and move on to the next line of code? Understand that that third party toolbox is not a standard one that we all have (it's not even from the Mathworks) so we don't know.

[Alice]

Screen displays the image and moves to the next line of code, but when the next line is ginput() I get an error.

Thanks for your help, I know not everyone has the toolbox. :)

[Alice]

What do the x and y coordinates that you get from ginput relate to? Are they pixels, or are they just coordinates on an arbitrary scale?

[KSSV]

They are the coordinates/ locations where you have clicked.

Answer 2

[Ann G]

You can use the ginput and save the coordinates x,y by choosing the items.

    [x,y]=ginput; 
save x 
save y

Answer 3

[Mihaela Duta]

I would suggest to use an image processing package to identify the areas of interest in your picture. You can use Adobe Photoshop if you have it, but gimp is an excellent free alternative (https://www.gimp.org/).

I am not sure whether you want to use these regions of interest when displaying the picture during the experiment, or for data processing. If you want to highlight regions of interest during the stimuli presentation, you can do that using the FrameRect function from Psychtoolbox.