Hi Markus,
If you have a 3D MATRIX of numbers, and the distance you want to sort by is stored, say, in the (1,1) location of each slice in the third dimension, try:
A = rand(5,5,10);
[~,sortOrder] = sort(A(1,1,:),3);
A_sorted = A(:,:,sortOrder);
If you have a 3D CELL of numbers, read below:
Unfortunately when passing a cell to sort(), it expects that cell to be a cell of strings. The only way to sort numeric data in a cell is to convert it to a matrix, as below:
Let's first make your data into a cell (I'm only including "distance"... I presume since your data is in a cell to start with then there's a good reason you didn't store it as a vector of distances):
distanceCell = num2cell(rand(1,1,20))
We then just make a vector from only the numeric values in the cell
distancesVector = cat(1,distanceCell{1,1,:});
Then we sort that vector and reorder the cell accordingly.
[~, sortOrder] = sort(distancesVector);
sortedCell = distanceCell(:,:,sortOrder);
