Starting a pattern recognition project

I have just completed Andrew Ng's ML course and I am halfway through Geoffrey Hinton's NN for ML and Fundamentals of digital image & video processing by Aggelos K. Katsaggelos. I would like to implement my own pattern recognition project using MATLAB. I would like to distinguish sports images and I have begun gathering images, I currently have around 3000 separated into 3 folders/classes, I'm aiming for around 10000 to start with for 5-8 classes. I have 3 questions:

1. Is this project too ambitious for a beginner? 2. What MATLAB components would be required to complete this project? 3. Are there any obvious pitfalls with a project such as this?

Thank you!