The whole process should be image acquisition, image enhancement, feature extraction, and image recognition. First two stages, you need to know about matlab, as matlab has built in function to do these tasks. You can refer to the help files.
For feature extraction, try to study some papers, and decide which method you want to use. Understand the algorithm and write the matlab code. For recognition, also same, study about the methods, and decide which methods you want to use, then do the coding.