1. Architecture for real-time parallel detection and extraction of maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) comprising a communication interface and processing circuitry to in real-time: receive a data stream of an intensity image via the communication interface; provide labels for light image regions and dark image regions within the intensity image for a given intensity threshold t; find extremal regions within the intensity image based upon the labels; and determine MSER ellipses parameters based on the extremal regions and MSER criteria.