hi, I am a student currently planning to use matlab to analyze an image and recognize an object such as a tennis ball on an image.

I am a completely newbie to matlab. Most programming I have done is in VB.net. My professor recommended me to use matlab image processing toolbox. I just got the user guide today, it's like 1200 pages long. I will read it, but I am afraid the due date is too close. So I try to speed up the process by posting on the forum and look for some guidance.

Basically we will take a picture of the entire court from above, and the tennis balls will lay on the court. It should be perfect circular with distinct yellow color. I used VB to scan the image pixel by pixel, and returned some RGB value. Then I set the program to return the pixel coordinate based on the RGB matching. Of course, each ball's color is slightly different because of shadow, resolution, etc

However, it seems matlab offers way more techniques than just color matching. However, can someone give me some advise the technique I should go for? Or the chapters in the user guide that I should read first? or certain commands?

Thank you very much.