A very brief description to important steps in building your Object Detector

Getting Started with Matlab:

Here are some of the links of torrent from where you can download the different versions of Matlab:
Matlab2013a: http://kickass.to/matlab-r2013a-8-1-0-604-t7283516.html
Matlab2012: http://kickass.to/matlab-2012-for-linux-32-64-bit-cracked-t6271227.html

Download the entire package from any one of the above links and install it. All steps regarding installation is listed in
a .pdf file present in the package.

After then you may start exploring the huge pool of computational facilities that Matlab has to offer. The basics of
Matlab may be found in the link http://www.mathworks.in/help/pdf_doc/matlab/matlab_prog.pdf. You may also
try by starting with some of the links listed below:
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~gerry/MATLAB/programming/basics.html#flow
http://www.math.utah.edu/~eyre/computing/matlab-intro/matrices.html
http://web.uvic.ca/~monahana/eos225/matlab_tutorial/tutorial_1/introduction_to_matlab.html

You may find several other links by Google-ing.

A good book for learning Image Processing is:
ftp://217.219.170.14/Electronic%20Group/Hashemi%20kamangar/Image%20Processing/(Ebook)%20Prentice%20Ha
ll%20-%20Digital%20Image%20Processing%20By%20Gonzalez%202nd%20Edition%202002.pdf
Chapters 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12 teach the fundamentals and basics of Image Processing. Many other books and sites for
learning the basics of image processing may be found by Googl-ing.

For the event The Object Detector, you will require a camera, of which a web camera is a good choice. The video
from the web camera need to be processes by Matlab. For that image acquisition is required, details of which may
be found in the Image Acquisition Toolbox of Matlab. ( http://www.mathworks.in/products/imaq/ )

So from the web camera you will be getting a series of images per seconds. You have to process them in Matlab to
detect objects. For running the actuators like motors, for robot movement, you have to use a Microcontroller
(MCU). A commonly used MCU board is Arduino. You may find several tutorials of Arduino in
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCxzA9_kg6s

For communication between Matlab and Arduino, you have to use the Serial USB Port. You may take help from this
link to configure the communication link. http://home.iitb.ac.in/~rahul./ITSP/serial_comm_matlab.pdf

You may send some symbols to the Arduino, from Matlab and write Arduino Programs to take actions for those
corresponding symbols, to move the robot accordingly.

Note: You will be allowed to carry your laptop connected to the robot during the event. The arena will be small, so
no problem will be there. Try to use as longer wires as possible

Try to use as lesser Matlab functions which are related to object detection. There are points allotted to this fact. Try
to build your own object detection algorithm. You may use basic Matlab functions like sum(), mean(), corr(), corr2(),
etc.

Best of Luck!!