How do I feed images from a folder into MATLAB periodically?

I'm trying to create a program that will process a sequence of images captured by a usb webcam and display the count of objects in it.

I've programmed the webcam to save a picture in a specific folder and replace it periodically with the subsequent pictures (with the same name). I need to attach a code that will fetch the images periodically into a function that will do the processing.

Answer 1

[Robert]

I think a timer and imread would do what you want.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

Robert's suggestion of timer() is a good one that might be quite enough for what you need.

In some situations, you might want to receive notification if files or a directory have changed. See http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_external/using-a-net-object.html for the MS Windows solution, and http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_external/using-a-net-object.html for a timer-based directory check.