Spectrogram will solve your problem(dont remember the function name in matlab), I have some files in case u r interested.
Also, other Joint time frequency analysis tools which can be accessed at dsp.rice.edu would help too.
answer to ur second question:
why not use a simple sorting alg like bubble sort or selection sort and get done with it, and ur array size seems to b really small and no optimization is needed.
you shouldnot worry if the different eigen vectors are linearly dependent.
i.e., matlabR11 could be giving the solution as [1 2 1]
and if matlabR12 gives as [0.5 1 0.5], they are still the same.
You have to break down the problem:
What value constitutes a blacked out image
(image ranges could be 0-255 or 0-1 or something else)
instead if your problem is like finding number of entries in a matrix which are greater than a value x, then the answer would be:
sum(A>=x)
where x is the...