1. A method 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; forming metapixels from the input image; connecting all metapixels 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.