Using matlab to calculate the properties of a polygon defined as a list of points

Question

Does MATLAB have a built-in function to find general properties like center of mass & moments of inertia for a polygon defined as a list of (non-integer valued) points?

regionprops performs this task for integer valued points, on the assumption that these represent indices of pixels in an image. But the only functions I can find that treat non integral point lists are polyarea and inpolygon.

My kludge for now is to create a bwconncomp structure with all the points multiplied by some large value (like 10,000), then feeding it in to regionprops, but wondered if there is a more elegant solution.

Answer 1

You should check out the submission POLYGEOM by H.J. Sommer on the MathWorks File Exchange. It looks like it has all the property measurements you want, and nice documentation describing the formulae used in the code.

Answer 2

I don't know of a function in MATLAB that would do this for you.

However, poly2mask might be of use for you to create the pixel masks to feed into regionprops. I also suggest that, should you decide to go this route, you carefully test how much the discretization affects the results, so that you don't create crazy large arrays (and waste time) for no real gain in accuracy.

Answer 3

One possibility is to farm out the calculations to the Java Topology Suite. I don't know about "moments of inertia", but it does at least have a centroid method.