Here's a demo. When [x0,y0] is [4,3] and [x1,y1] is [6,7], a rectangle of 1 will be placed in matrix A in rows 3:7 from the top and columns 4:6 from the left.
See inline comments for details.
% Create 0s matrix
A = zeros(8, 8);
% Define [x0,y0] and [x1,y1]
x0 = 4;
y0 = 3;
x1 = 6; % x1 >= x0
y1 = 7; % y1 >= y0
% replace section with 1s
[y,x] = meshgrid(x0:x1, y0:y1);
idx = sub2ind(size(A),x,y);
A(idx) = 1
Result
A =
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
If you'd rather use logicals, replace zeros() with false() and replace A(idx) = 1 with A(idx) = true.
