Looking for efficient way to perform a computation - Matlab - performance

Question

I have a scalar function f([x,y],[i,j])= exp(-norm([x,y]-[i,j])^2/sigma^2) which receives two 2-dimensional vectors as input (norm here implements the Euclidean norm). The values of x,i range in 1:w and the values y,j range in 1:h. I want to create a cell array X such that X{x,y} will contain a w x h matrix such that X{x,y}(i,j) = f([x,y],[i,j]). This can obviously be done using 4 nested loops like so:
for x=1:w;
for y=1:h;
X{x,y}=zeros(w,h);
for i=1:w
for j=1:h
X{x,y}(i,j)=f([x,y],[i,j])
end
end
end
end
This is however extremely inefficient. I would very much appreciate an efficient way to create X.

Answer 1

The one way to do this is to remove the 2 innermost loops and replace then with a vectorised version. By the look of your f function this shouldn't be too bad
First we need to construct two matrices containing the 1 to w on every row and 1 to h on every column like so
wMat=repmat(1:w,h,1);
hMat=repmat(1:h,w,1)';
This is going to represent the inner two loops, and the transpose will allow us to get all combinations. Now we can vectorise the calculation (f([x,y],[i,j])= exp(-norm([x,y]-[i,j])^2/sigma^2)):
for x=1:w;
for y=1:h;
temp1=sqrt((x-wMat).^2+(y-hMat).^2);
X{x,y}=exp(temp1/(sigma^2));
end
end
Where we have computed the Euclidean norm for all pairs of nodes in the inner loops at once.

Answer 2

Some discussion and code
The trick here is to perform the norm-calculations with numeric arrays and save the results into a cell array version as late as possible. For performing the norm-calculations you can take help of ndgrid, bsxfun and some permute + reshape to give it the "shape" as needed for the final cell array version. So, here's the vectorized approach to perform these tasks -
%// Create x-y/i-j values to be used for calculation of function values
[xi,yi] = ndgrid(1:w,1:h);
%// Get the norm values
normvals = sqrt(bsxfun(#minus,xi(:),xi(:).').^2 + ...
bsxfun(#minus,yi(:),yi(:).').^2);
%// Get the actual function values
vals = exp(-normvals.^2/sigma^2);
%// Get the values into blocks of a 4D array and then re-arrange to match
%// with the shape of numeric array version of X
blks = reshape(permute(reshape(vals, w*h, h, []), [2 1 3]), h, w, h, w);
arranged_blks = reshape(permute(blks,[2 3 1 4]),w,h,w,h);
%// Finally get the cell array version
X = squeeze(mat2cell(arranged_blks,w,h,ones(1,w),ones(1,h)));
Benchmarking and runtimes
After improving the original loopy code with pre-allocation for X and function-inling f, runtime-benchmarks were performed with it against the proposed vectorized approach with datasizes as w, h = 60 and the runtime results thus obtained were -
----------- With Improved loopy code
Elapsed time is 41.227797 seconds.
----------- With Vectorized code
Elapsed time is 2.116782 seconds.
This suggested a whooping close to 20x speedup with the proposed solution!
For extremely huge datasizes
If you are dealing with huge datasizes, essentially you are not giving enough memory for bsxfun to work with, and bsxfun is known to use up a lot of memory for giving you a performance-efficient vectorized solution. So, for such huge-datasize cases, you can use the following loopy approach to replace normvals calculations that was listed in the earlier bsxfun based solution -
%// Get the norm values
nx = numel(xi);
normvals = zeros(nx,nx);
for ii = 1:nx
normvals(:,ii) = sqrt( (xi(:) - xi(ii)).^2 + (yi(:) - yi(ii)).^2 );
end

Answer 3

It seems to me that when you run through the cycle for x=w, y=h, you are calculating all the values you need at once. So you don't need recalculate them. Once you have this:
for i=1:w
for j=1:h
temp(i,j)=f([x,y],[i,j])
end
end
Then, e.g. X{1,1} is just temp(1,1), X{2,2} is just temp(1:2,1:2), and so on. If you can vectorise the calculation of f (norm here is just the Euclidean norm of that vector?) then it will get even simpler.