Just a note to say I finally found out (via here) how to get Matlab imagesc plot to have the y-axis with values running from smallest to largest from bottom to top i.e. the correct way! The above link says this info is actually included in the imagesc documentation, but only for a slightly more recent version of Matlab than I have at work. I’ve written a little function to do this for me, which I will share:
function h = imagesc_normal(x, y, N)
% h = imagesc_normal(x, y, N)
%
% This function will return an imagesc-style plot, but with the y-axis
% running from smallest number at the bottom to largest number at the top.
% x is a vector of i values for the x-axis bins, y is a vector of j values
% for the y-axis bins, and N is an i x j array of bin values.
%
% An example of its use would be to plot the output of hist3 e.g.
% [N, xy] = hist3(randn(1000,2), [20 20]);
% imagesc_normal(xy{1}, xy{2}, N);
% transpose N
N = N.';
% plot image
h = imagesc(x, y, N);
% set y-axis to correct orientation
set(gca, 'YDir', 'normal');