Assign value to matrix using vector value as an index

Will appreciate your help in the following problem.

Let's say I have a 3D matrix (Image):

A=zeros(3,3,3)

and I have a column vector with NaNs and numbers:

a=[NaN; 2; 3]

I want to assign to matrix A value of

B=[255, 100, 50]

such that the values of vector "a" provide the column indices for matrix A, NaN values means nothing is asigned. The result would be:

A=[0 0 0; 0 255 0; 0 0 255] [0 0 0; 0 100 0; 0 0 100] [0 0 0; 0  50 0; 0 0  50];

I use the following code, but it runs very long if I process N images in the video..

Im=Some RGB Image; M=size(Im,1);
Vec_ind=Some column vector of size Mx1
B=[255, 100, 50];
for i=1:M
    if ~isnan(Vec_ind(i,1)) 
        j_im=Vec_ind(i,1);
                    
        Im(i,j_im,1)=B(1);
        Im(i,j_im,2)=B(2);
        Im(i,j_im,3)=B(3);
    end

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

One solution:

[row, page] = ndgrid(1:numel(a), 1:numel(B));  %cartesian product of indices of a and B. Indicates which row and page the values go in
col = a(row);   %matching destination column
assignee = B(page);  %matching value to assign
tokeep = ~isnan(col);
A(sub2ind(size(A), row(tokeep), col(tokeep), page(tokeep))) = assignee(tokeep)

[Alex Zibitsker]

Works perfect. Thanks a lot!

Is it possbile with the same approach to assign the B values according to a range of columns, instead of a=[nan; 2; 3]; a_tag=[nan nan; 1, 2; 2, 3]?

Such that

A=[0 0 0; 255 255 0; 0 255 255] [0 0 0; 100 100 0; 0 100 100] [0 0 0; 50 50 0; 0 50 50];

With just replacing "a" as "a_tag" it doesn't work unfortunatelly

[Guillaume]

The idea is to build 3 arrays of destination row, column and page and replicate your B accordingly, then pass that to sub2ind. You can achieve that many ways.

row = repmat((1:size(a_tag, 1))', 1, size(a_tag, 2), numel(B))
col = repmat(a_tag, 1, 1, numel(B))
page = repmat(permute(1:numel(B), [1 3 2]), size(a_tag, 1), size(a_tag, 2))
assignee = B(page);  %matching value to assign
tokeep = ~isnan(col);
A(sub2ind(size(A), row(tokeep), col(tokeep), page(tokeep))) = assignee(tokeep)

[Alex Zibitsker]

Thanks!