Calculating distance between points from imported data table.

Hello everyone, I have two tables, one with X coordinates of a point, and the other with the respective Y coordinates. They are all sorted by time, meaning that the first value of the column happened before the one after it (even though I do not have the time showing). I want to calculate the distance between those points. However, I am not getting the right results. Can someone help me out?

My code is as follows:

X = xlsread('Results','A1:A191'); Y = xlsread('Results','B1:B191'); i = 2:length(X); j = 2:length(Y); if i == j Distance = ((X(i)-X(i-1)).^2 + (Y(j)-Y(j-1)).^2).^(1/2); end

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

If you have the stats toolbox, you can easily and simply use pdist2() to find the distance of every point to every point.

distances = pdist2([x,y], [x,y]);

After that you can get whatever distance you want from the distances array.

Does that help?

[Ricardo Whitaker]

I believe the function pdist2() it is the function I should be using, but when I runt he code now the Distance output is a matrix of 190 x 190, and that is because it is reading the distance between every single point in the list. How can I specify that I want the distance between one point to its following points?

New Code is below: X = xlsread('Results','A1:A191'); Y = xlsread('Results','B1:B191'); i = 2:length(X); j = 2:length(Y); if i == j Distance = pdist2([X(i),Y(j)],[X(i-1),Y(j-1)]); end

[Image Analyst]

Maybe you simply want the diff() function to compute differences between adjacent elements???

See http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/13205#answer_18099