Looking for a way to patch 44k polygons fast

The following is a part of a function that patches triangles with the corresponding colours using a for-loop

      for i = 1:numel(tri)/3
          color(i, :) = img(center(i,1), center(i,2),:); %gets current color from img
          patch(points(tri(i,:), 2), points(tri(i,:), 1), color(i,:)/256, 'EdgeColor','none'); %patches color on polygon
      end

     %size(tri)               = 44721x3
     %size(color)             = 44271x3
     %size(points)            = 22429x2
     %size(points(tri(i,:),1) = 3x1
     %size(points(tri(i,:),2) = 3x1
     %size(color(i,:)/256)    = 1x3

The only problem is that patching this large number of polygons takes a long time (+/- 19s). Tried using `fill` instead of `patch` to see if that was faster, but sadly that was 13s slower.

Is there a way to speed up the patching process? For example by patching all the polygons in 1 sweep without looping?

Answer 1

[Greg Dionne]

Have you tried using just one patch? You can specify X and Y as matrices (this example taken from the doc page on patch )

x = [2 5; 2 5; 8 8];
y = [4 0; 8 2; 4 0];
c = [0; 1];
figure
patch(x,y,c)
colorbar

You can also use the 'Faces' and 'Vertices' syntax.

v = [2 4; 2 8; 8 4; 5 0; 5 2; 8 0];
f = [1 2 3; 4 5 6];
col = [0; 1];
figure
patch('Faces',f,'Vertices',v,'FaceVertexCData',col,'FaceColor','flat');
colorbar

[YT]

Thank you for your answer. I forgot to look a bit further in the documentation, but this definatly helped me out. Went from 19s to 1.5seconds!