Finding the closest neighbouring coordinates in 3D

Hello community,

The data I have is a matrix with X,Y,Z coordinates. I need to find the neighboring points in a mesh. For instance, the point N381 has the closest neighbors N380, N388, N382 and N374.

I was first thinking about comparing the coordinates one by one to each other and look for the minumums, but it feels like when I work on a large size matrix it will demand a lot of computation. Does anyone have an idea to proceed in a more practical way?

Best regards

Answer 1

[Rik]

As suggested here, if you have the statistics toolbox, you can use the pdist function. If you have more structured data (e.g. a mesh), you could probably prevent having to calculate all inter-point distances. Note that you will 'only' have to call pdist once to calculate all distances.