3D Curtain plot for Lidar data

I have geolocated lidar backscatter data from a flight that i need to plot.

The data are functions of time T and Altitude: Longitude(Time), Latitude(Time), LidarData(Time,Altitude).

The number of Time data points is >20,000 (entire flight) and number of Altitude data points is 600. So the LidarData is a large (20,000, 600) matrix.

In other words for each Time T have a location ( Longitude, Latitude) and LidarData at that location that extends from the ground to a specific altitude (the altitude for each location varies with time). All the 3D plots in Matlab allow a mesh, surface or scatter plot of X,Y,Z data.

I can plot individual scatter3 plots for each time (location) but with >20,000 points it takes a long time and the plot is imposisble to manipulate (change view angle, colorbar scale, etc.). Is there a better way to do this?

There is an existing (related) question on this but could not find an any answers: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/4496-4d-curtain-plot

Answer 1

[darova]

Can you plot only part of it?

clc,clear

[x,y,z] = peaks(100);
i = 1:5:100;
surf(x(i,i),y(i,i),z(i,i))

[darova]

@HRmatlab's comment

Thank you for the suggestion. Yes I have plotted small segments.

Plotting the entire data set using a loop and scatter3 produces the desired plot but it takes > 30 minutes and makes the plot impossible to adjust (rotate, zoom, etc.).

The surf (or mesh) plots require an x, y mesh grid in other words x, y, z have to be NxM arrays.

I have x(N), y(N), z(N,M). Converting x,y to gridded arrays will slow things down.

But i will take another look. Than you for the feedback.

[darova]

Try griddata or scatteredInterpolant to create matrices and use surf