Benchmarking answers to question 18282458 in stackoverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18282458/how-to-count-length-of-runs-of-values-in-matrix-columns

18282458.m

d = [0 1 1 1 1;
    1 1 0 0 0;
    1 1 1 0 1;
    0 0 0 0 0;
    1 1 0 1 1];

tic
for k=1:1e4,
    nrows = size(d,1);
    d_neg_cell = num2cell(~d,[nrows 1]);
    zeros_d = cellfun(@find, d_neg_cell, 'UniformOutput', 0);
    find_runs = @(v) nonzeros( diff([0; v; nrows+1])-1 ).';
    sol = cellfun(find_runs, zeros_d, 'UniformOutput', 0);
end
toc

tic
for k=1:1e4
    v = {};
    for e = d,
        f = diff([0 e' 0]);
        v{end+1} = find(f<0) - find(f>0);
    end
end
toc

In MATLAB 2012b (64-bit) on Windows 7, it returns

Elapsed time is 4.131100 seconds.
Elapsed time is 0.534464 seconds.

A ratio of 7.7 in execution time.