MATLAB: How to determine maximum length in the x and y direction respectively

Question

How do you determine the determine the maximum length in x and y direction of an irregular rectangular shape and then also show this by a line to mark this length.. If it was a regular shape i was just going to subtract the max y value from the y min value and so forth. How can can I calculate it from the ccordinates. Below is the image and attached is the text file. Any codes wil be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Try this:

xy = dlmread('test2-coordinates.txt');
x = xy(:, 1);
y = xy(:, 2);
plot(x, y, 'g*');
grid on;
% Find the two points farthest apart
distances = pdist2(xy, xy);
maxDistance = max(distances(:))
[rows, columns] = find(distances == maxDistance)
index1 = rows(1);
index2 = rows(2);
% Draw a line between index1 and index2
hold on;
plot([x(index1), x(index2)], [y(index1), y(index2)], 'bo-', 'LineWidth', 2);