Practical example of Histogram and CDF

Below is an example of a (randomly generated) gray-scale image (a). The image is displayed from a matrix of random numbers between 1 and 26 (number of letters in the English alphabet). Underneath it (d) is displayed the same matrix but each number is replaced by a letter (at the position determined by the original number).

Bar plots (b) and (c) show histograms computed from the image/letter matrix (they are, of course, the same; the only difference is that in one case, occurrences of intensity values are counted and in the other case, occurrences of letters are counted). Note that the original numbers are generated from a normal distribution (mean is 13) and this can be seen on the histograms as well. Since the normal distribution has relatively small sigma, certain 'edge' values/letters do not occur in the image/letter matrix (which can again be seen on the histogram).

Finally, plots (e) and (f) show the cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) of the image/letter matrix (or technically, of their histograms). Again, they are the same for the numbers and letters, since the underlying distributions are the same. Note the 'S' shape of the CDFs - this is caused by the fact that normal distribution was used to generate the values. If the values were generated uniformly, the CDFs would approximately look like the function f(x)=x/y.

Code to reproduce the figure above (not exactly, since the image is random):

% Creates random alphabetic matrix and displays it as an image.
% The later the letter appears in the alphabet, the higher the intensity
% it represents (e.g., A = black, Z = white).
% Histogram and CDF of the alphabetic (and numeric but it's the same) image
% are shown.
% The "count(value)" in CDF plot x-axis labels represents a method that counts
% the occurrences of the value 'value'. Values of for example 'A to D' means
% it counts the occurrences of all A, B, C, D and sums the occurrences up,
% that is:
%       count(A to D) = sum([count(A), count(B), count(C), count(D)])
 
% some parameters to play with:
random_mode = 'normal';  % 'normal' or 'uniform' random number generation
pseudo_sigma = 3;  % if normal distribution, use this parameter to scale the Gaussian.
image_size = [7 7];  % size of the generated image (not fool-proof, use sensible values only)
 
%% Below is the code to generate and show the images, histograms and CDFs
% create a figure window
fig = figure('Name', sprintf('Random gray-scale image with intensities drawn from a %s distribution.', random_mode));
 
% create an array of the capital letters
letters = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
num_letters = length(letters);  % number of letters
 
% create a 10 by 10 matrix of random integers from 1 to 26 (i.e. the length of the alphabet)
switch random_mode  % we need to identify the requested random number generation method and act accordingly
    case 'normal'  % normal random generator
        numMat = ceil(randn(image_size) * pseudo_sigma + num_letters / 2);  % normally distributed random numbers
        numMat(numMat > num_letters) = num_letters;
        numMat(numMat < 1) = num_letters;
    case 'uniform'  % uniform random generator
        numMat = randi(num_letters, image_size);  % uniformly distributed random numbers
    otherwise  % unknown method request (perhaps a typo), throw error
        error('Invalid random number generation mode: %s', random_mode);
end
 
ax = subplot(2, 3, 1);  % create a subplot in the main figure - this is used to show multiple plots and images in the same figure
% this can be thought of as a gray-scale image, let's plot it as such
intensity_image = numMat ./ num_letters;  % theoretically we can also plot the "raw" numbers and adjust the intensity scale instead
imagesc(intensity_image, 'Parent', ax);
axis(ax, 'image', 'off');  % no need for axis to show for images
colormap(ax, gray);  % sets the color map to "gray-scale" (better to see the intensity)
title('(a) Gray-scale image from the numeric matrix', 'FontSize', 18)
 
% compute histogram of the values contained in the matrix
numHist = hist(numMat(:), 1:num_letters);
 
subplot(2, 3, 2);
% numHist variable holds the individual counts or occurrences of the values in the matrix
bar(numHist);  % bar plot to show the histogram
title('(b) Histogram of the numeric matrix', 'FontSize', 18);
xlim([1 length(letters)]);
ax = gca;
ax.XTick = 1:length(letters);
 
% let's create a matrix of letters from the numeric matrix, by substituting the integers with letters
letterMat = letters(numMat);
 
% manually count the occurrences of the individual letters
letterHist = zeros(1, length(letters));
for l = letters
    lpos = find(letters == l);
    letterHist(lpos) = sum(sum(l == letterMat));
end
 
subplot(2, 3, 3);
% variable letterHist holds the counts of the individual letters in the alphabetic matrix
bar(letterHist);
title('(c) Histogram of the alphabetic matrix', 'FontSize', 18);
xlim([1 length(letters)]);
ax = gca;
ax.XTick = 1:length(letters);
ax.XTickLabel = letters';
 
% next, we need to compute and plot the CDFs
subplot(2, 3, 5);
% CDF can be computed from a histogram by calculating the cumulative sum of the histogram
plot(cumsum(numHist));
title('(e) CDF of the numeric matrix', 'FontSize', 18);
xlim([1 length(letters)]);
ax = gca;
ax.XTick = 1:num_letters;
ax.XTickLabelRotation = -90;
xlabels = ['count(1)      '; [repmat('count(1 to ', num_letters-1, 1) cell2mat(splitlines(sprintf('%2d\n', 2:num_letters))) repmat(')', num_letters-1, 1)]];
ax.XTickLabel = xlabels;
 
subplot(2, 3, 6);
% the same procedure as before, just with the alphabetic histogram
plot(cumsum(letterHist));
title('(f) CDF of the alphabetic matrix', 'FontSize', 18);
xlim([1 length(letters)]);
ax = gca;
ax.XTick = 1:num_letters;
ax.XTickLabelRotation = -90;
letters_vec = cell2mat(split(letters, ''));
xlabels =  ['count(A)     '; [repmat('count(A to ', num_letters-1, 1) letters_vec(2:end) repmat(')', num_letters-1, 1)]];
ax.XTickLabel = xlabels;
 
% display the letter matrix
e_letterMat = char(zeros(image_size .* [1 2]));  % insert horizontal spaces between letters
e_letterMat(:, 1:2:end) = letterMat;
tstring = evalc('disp(e_letterMat)');  % convert the matrix into a contiguous string
ax = subplot(2, 3, 4);
pos = get(ax, 'position');
annotation(gcf,'Textbox', pos, 'String',tstring,'Interpreter','Tex', 'FontName', 'FixedWidth','Units','Normalized',...
    'EdgeColor', 'none', 'FaceAlpha', 0,...
    'FontWeight', 'bold', 'FontSize', floor(32 / (max(image_size) / 10)));  % display the stirng as an annotation
axis(ax, 'image', 'off');
title('(d) Original letter matrix', 'FontSize', 18);