Combining specific regions of multiple images in a stripe pattern.

[EDIT: 20110526 15:43 CDT - reformat - WDR]

I'm trying to combine images into a "stripe" pattern. Below are two example images. However, in normal use I'll need to expand this two ~6-12 images.

http://i.imgur.com/v05PN.png http://i.imgur.com/anWrZ.png

I can guarantee that the images are the same size, the text lines up, etc. What I am looking to do is merge the colored boxes so that each image is represented as a "stripe".

I tried something where I made stripes of the entire image and compositing them:

nimg = zeros(size(img1));
stripes = floor(linspace(1, size(img1,2), 500));
for i = 1:length(stripes)-1
    inds = stripes(i):stripes(i+1);
    if mod(i,2) == 0
        nimg(:,inds,:) = img1(:,inds,:);
    else
        nimg(:,inds,:) = img2(:,inds,:);
    end
end

But this doesn't work very well since the boxes don't line-up.

I assume I need to do some image-processing to extract the colored regions and then only slice those regions up. However, I don't have much experience with the image-processing toolbox. If anyone can point me to a set of functions for extracting the positions of the boxes I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

-Will

[Will Dampier]

Also, I don't know a priori which colors will be present in each image however I do know that the desired color is the only thing that differs between the images.