Question

I am looking for a way to store a large variable number of matrixes in an array in MATLAB.

Are there any ways to achieve this?

Example:

for i: 1:unknown   myArray(i) = zeros(500,800); end 

Where unknown is the varied length of the array, I can revise with additional info if needed.

Update: Performance is the main reason I am trying to accomplish this. I had it before where it would grab the data as a single matrix, show it in real time and then proceed to process the next set of data.

I attempted it using multidimensional arrays as suggested below by Rocco, however my data is so large that I ran out of Memory, I might have to look into another alternative for my case. Will update as I attempt other suggestions.

Update 2: Thank you all for suggestions, however I should have specified beforehand, precision AND speed are both an integral factor here, I may have to look into going back to my original method before trying 3-d arrays and re-evaluate the method for importing the data.

Answer 1

If all of the matrices are going to be the same size (i.e. 500×800), then you can just make a 3D array:

nUnknown;  % The number of unknown arrays myArray = zeros(500,800,nUnknown); 

To access one array, you would use the following syntax:

subMatrix = myArray(:,:,3);  % Gets the third matrix 

You can add more matrices to myArray in a couple of ways:

myArray = cat(3,myArray,zeros(500,800)); % OR myArray(:,:,nUnknown+1) = zeros(500,800); 

If each matrix is not going to be the same size, you would need to use cell arrays like Hosam suggested.

EDIT: I missed the part about running out of memory. I’m guessing your nUnknown is fairly large. You may have to switch the data type of the matrices (single or even a uintXX type if you are using integers). You can do this in the call to zeros:

myArray = zeros(500,800,nUnknown,'single');