Web Development

I am a student of B.C.S(hons)and yet working on the image processing.My project is to make a desktop apllication that has the ability
of face recognition on the basis of stored models in the date bases.Please advise me the selection of programming language or tools that are the best to support that project and the different steps to be followed.
I have gone a little bit ahead using VB.Net but is stuckup at the stage of feature enhancment algorithims as well as the matching algorithim that can be used for getting the features extraction.Please suggest some E-Books as well as paper books.