1. A method of operating a processing system that includes one or more parallel processors to determine MSERs of an input image, the method comprising: accepting an input image into the processing system; forming metapixels from the input image by labeling each respective connected region in the input image consisting of all connected pixels having the same respective intensity level as a respective metapixel; connecting all metapixels of the input image to their corresponding local minima to determining a catchment basin for each metapixel, including carrying out a first set of operations executed in parallel on at least one of the one or more parallel processors; identifying which of the catchment basins are connected, and connecting the catchment basins to form an MSER data structure, including carrying out a second set of operations executed in parallel on at least one of the one or more parallel processors; determining the area of each region at each level of the MSER data structure, calculating a measure of stability and any local minimum in the calculated stability, wherein a local minimum indicates detection of an MSER, wherein the forming of the megapixels uses a parallel method for connected component labeling using at least one of the parallel processors, and/or wherein the connecting of the metapixels includes using at least one of the parallel processors to carry out watershed operations in parallel on the metapixels to determine the catchment basins, such that the detected MSERs of the accepted image are available to one or more computer vision tasks.