faster imread with matlab for images with small portion of data

Question

I'm trying to track objects in separated frames of a video. If I do a background subtraction before storing the images the size of the images will be much smaller (like one fifth). so I was wondering if I can also read these images faster since most of the pixels are zero. Still simple imread didn't make any difference.

I also tried the pixelregion option for loading only the location of objects and that didn't work either since there are like ten objects in each frame.

Answer 1

It may be faster to store the frames as a video file, rather than individual images. Then you can read them using vision.VideoFileReader from the Computer Vision System Toolbox.