MATLAB: Find minimum value index across cells

Question

Hi,

I am trying to find the minimum value across cells and not within a cell. For ex: Input is:

in = cell(1,5);
in(:) = {(zeros(3,3))};
rng('shuffle');
for n=1:5
    in{n}(:)=rand(3,3);
end

Now I want to find minimum value for each 3×3 location (out is 3×3 data ie. 9 values) across cells. I also want to find which cell had the minimum value.

Can this be done via cellfun? Can I use cellfun for an across cell operation?

I have tried:

min(in{1:5})

but it gives me too many input arguments

I also tried to see if I can do this element by element and hence I tried to do

min(in{1:n}(1,1))

But that said "bad cell reference operation"

Is there a simple way to do this without using loops?

Thanks

Answer 1

Since you want to find the minimum value across the cells, this implies that the matrices within the cells all have the same size. In that case, why don't you use a single matrix of a larger dimension?

 numdims = ndims(in{1}) + 1;
 inasmat = cat(numdims, in{:})
 [minacross, mincell] = min(inasmat, [], numdims)

cellfun will be of no use for what you want to do.