Tracking Line in an Image

I have a 2D matrix/image that looks like the attached image when plotted using the "imagesc" function. The x-axis is time, y-axis is position, and brightness indicates signal strength.

I would like to trace a 1D signal from this image that indicates the flow of the signal, aka, the movement of the signal position with respect to time. Specifically, the output is a 1D array of 170 elements with values ranging from 0 to 1500.

Would anyone know a method or a MATLAB function that would help in this problem? Thanks a lot! Please let me know if the question is not clear.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

I'd probably use cross correlation of each column with the next column to determine how much the column has shifted vertically. Keep track of the number of rows it shifts for each column.

[yjin]

This works pretty well. Thank you very much!