MATLAB: Saving +- 2000 tiff images.

data importdigital image processingmemory

Hi
I would like to know if there is a way to save many tiff images into a cell (or if there is something better) in MATLAB. The dimensions of each image is 2085x1811x3 and they are uint8. This is the current attempt below:
imgType = '*.tif';
[filename, pathname] = uigetfile(imgType,'Select the MATLAB code file');
images  = dir([pathname imgType]);
Seq = cell(length(images),1);
for idx = 1:length(images)
    Seq{idx} = imread([pathname images(idx).name]);
end
image_num = 1;
imshow(Seq(image_num))
It works but crashes eventually if run for 2000 images, is there any way to store all of that information? I need the 2D matrix of each image, none of them may be overwritten. If the 2085x1811x3 dimensions can be read in as 2085x1811x1 instead I think that would help? Colour doesn't matter, only interested in grayscale values.

Best Answer

Each image has size 2085x1811x3 and is stored with 3*eight bits per pixel, then each image requires 11 megabytes of memory. There are more than two thousand of them, so you will need at least 23 gigbytes of memory to store them all. Does your computer have twenty-three gigabytes of main memory? Remember that computer memory (RAM, etc) is NOT the same as the harddrive capacity!
If you only need the grayscale then the total reduces down to 7.6 GB.
If you do not have this much memory then you have two choices:
  1. Buy more memory.
  2. change your algorithm so that you do not need to store all of the data (e.g. process one image at a time, subsample/resize, etc).
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