Matlab resources
Vectorization Techniques (the right way to code in Matlab)
Piotr Dollar's Image & Video Toolbox for Matlab (lots of useful functions to save you time on your projects)
The Lightspeed Matlab toolbox (If you want things to run faster)
Tutorials
Recognizing and Learning Object Categories (ICCV 2005 Tutorial)
Computer vision packages
VLfeat - The VLFeat open source library implements popular computer vision algorithms specializing in image understanding and local featurexs extraction and matching. Algorithms incldue Fisher Vector, VLAD, SIFT, MSER, k-means, hierarchical k-means, agglomerative information bottleneck, SLIC superpixes, quick shift superpixels, large scale SVM training, and many others.
OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) is an open source computer vision and machine learning software library. OpenCV was built to provide a common infrastructure for computer vision applications and to accelerate the use of machine perception in the commercial products.