How can I measure the area covered by a Bar Chart Plot?

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I want to calculate the area covered by this histogram plot (considering a boundary all over the figure and calculating the whole area) . How can I do that?
  3 Comments
Tawsif Mostafiz
Tawsif Mostafiz on 22 May 2021
I need to consider the whole bar chart as a complete area and calculate the percentage of pixel they hold compared to the background, filling the spaces in between. Something like this. Is there any way to do that?
Adam Danz
Adam Danz on 22 May 2021
> I need to consider the whole bar chart as a complete area and calculate the percentage of pixel they hold compared to the background, filling the spaces in between.
I don't think there's nearly enough information provided to understand what the question is.
  1. What defines the background? The x-axis in the first image you shared doesn't even show the axis limit values so the background is not defined.
  2. Are you refering to a histrogram where there is no space between bars or a bar plot where the width of bars is arbitrary?
  3. Are you looking for the area under the curve which would require fitting the distribution or are you just interested in individual bar heights?

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Accepted Answer

Scott MacKenzie
Scott MacKenzie on 22 May 2021
Edited: Scott MacKenzie on 22 May 2021
Your question is a bit of a moving target. The question title refers to a bar plot. The question text refers to a histogram with no mention of a bar plot. Then a bar chart is referred to in the comment. And you didn't answer any of the cyclist's questions.
If you are indeed working with a bar chart, and you want the area under the bars, with the bar widths adjusted to fill the available space, then...
% test data
d = randn(1,1000);
tiledlayout('flow');
nexttile;
y = histcounts(d);
bar(y, 'barwidth', 1);
a1 = sum(y)
set(gca, 'xlim', [0 25]);
nexttile;
x = 1:length(y);
area(x, y);
a2 = polyarea(x,y)
set(gca, 'xlim', [0 25]);
Output:
a1 =
1000
a2 =
945
The area is simply the sum(y) because the width of each bar is 1. a1 (1000) is the exact area under the bars in the bar chart.
The second chart is included since it is similar to the plot in your comment. a2 (945) is the area within a polygon defined by the points in the bar chart.
  6 Comments
Tawsif Mostafiz
Tawsif Mostafiz on 22 May 2021
Thank you for your insight. I want to see the difference in histogram analysis of different images by observing a single value. If this is inefficient, then can would it be better to fit a Gaussian curve over it and find out mean, variance and standard deviation and compare them for different images? If it is, then how is it possible?
Adam Danz
Adam Danz on 22 May 2021
> I want to see the difference in histogram analysis of different images by observing a single value.
What single value? If you're refering to the mean color value then you could compute the mean and std for the raw data or you could fit the distribution depending on how you want to interpret the results.

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More Answers (1)

William Rose
William Rose on 22 May 2021
If you make a histogram using Matlab's histogram command, for example as follows,
data=randn(1,1000);
h=histogram(data);
then you can determine the area as follows:
histArea=dot(h.Values,(h.BinEdges(2:end)-h.BinEdges(1:end-1)));
The above method multiplies each height by its corresponding width. It gives the right answer even if the bin widths are unequal. In the example I gave, the widths will be equal, but you could specify unequal bin widths in the histogram() function, and the area calculation above will still give the right area.

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