MATLAB: How to have matlab extract the max value of a column within a moving range

Question

So this is a little complicated, but I need matlab to extract the max value of a column within a range that changes based on surrounding values. So for example if I had a column that looked like this:

Row number       Data value
1                0.5
2                0.2
3                1
4                0.5
5                0.1
6                0.8
7                2
8                0.3
9                0.7
10               0.8
11               0.4
12               0.3
13               0.7
14               1

What I'd like a program to do is extract the largest value within 5 rows of that value. So, for example, the code should extract the 2 in row seven because it is within 5 rows of the 1 in row 3. It should also extract the 1 in row 14 because it's more than 5 rows away from the 2 in row 7.

I'm very new to matlab and I've been playing around with the few functions I do know, but I'm getting pretty stuck because I need this code to be interactive with the data set. I'd really appreciate any help/suggestions you might have.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Use imdilate() if you have the Image Processing Toolbox. It's a moving max filter

kernel = [1;1;1;1;1];  % Vertical 5 by 1 filter.
result = imdilate(yourArray, kernel);

yourArray can be a 1 or 2 D array.