I have an array of binary data with long stretches of ones and zeros and I want to find the indices of when it changes.
a = [ 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1]
I want to search for [1 0] and [0 1] to find the transition points. I'd like to avoid long loops to find these if possible. Any ideas?
Something like this should do the job:
b = diff(a); % (assuming 'a' is a vector)
oneFromZero = find(b == 1) + 1; % vector of indices of a '1' preceded by a '0'
zeroFromOne = find(b == -1) + 1; % vector of indices of a '0' preceded by a '1'
Depending on what you want exactly, you may or may not want to add 1 to the resulting arrays of indices.
I'd go with
d = a(1:end-1) - a(2:end);
ind = find(d);
Here, d will be 1 where you have a ... 1 0 ... in your bit string and it will be -1 where you have a ... 0 1 .... All the other elements in d will be 0, since, at those positions, the bits are equal to their neighbour.
With this in place, you can use find to get the indices where these two patterns occur. The whole procedure is of O(n) complexity, where n=length(a), since it requires two passes through a.
For a = [ 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1] the above code computes ind = [5 11].
d = a(1:end-1) - a(2:end); can be simplified to d = -diff(a);.To search for an arbitrary pattern of zeros and ones:
You can compute a convolution (conv) of the two sequences in bipolar (±1) form and then find the maxima. Since the convolution flips one of the inputs, it has to be flipped to undo that:
a = [ 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1];
pattern = [0 1 1];
result = find(conv(2*a-1, 2*pattern(end:-1:1)-1, 'valid')==numel(pattern));
In this example
result =
11
which means that [0 1 1] appears in a only once, namely at index 11.
A simpler approach is to use strfind, exploiting the undocumented fact that this function can be applied to numeric vectors:
result = strfind(a, pattern);
conv is more efficient than mine.
[1 0 ] and [0 1]) diff should be very fast
difffunction.