reading a cell is not supported and it should be mentioned in the documentation.

Here is the error:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
  what():  unknown data type (dtype: unknown (0); shape: [1,13233]; size: 0 bytes) for object named `0' at file `./results/LightenedCNN_C_lfw.mat'

Steps to reproduce:

from bob.io import matlab
matlab.read_varnames('./results/LightenedCNN_C_lfw.mat')

where the file is in here.

I will update this issue as I debug more.