Today, silicon chips are becoming more and more powerful despite the reduction in size. Various general processors and graphic processing units (GPUs) have been embedded in countless electronic gadgets such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile hand-phone, digital cameras, and etc. With the high processing power of these embedded platforms and ever increasing size of both volatile and non-volatile storage, it opens up a great opportunity to integrate computer vision (CV) applications to these relatively low-cost and standalone devices. Applying CV applications inside electronic gadgets can be the next trends in industrial or commercial market. These devices can do specific smart and intelligent job such as object or text recognition for manufacturing, surveillance and security, as well as entertainment. It is discovered that there is yet to have a standard embedded software or hardware architecture in embedded systems (ES) for CV. An open architecture is needed for CV researchers to develop CV application without worrying the underlying embedded platform or CV library dependency in ES. This project provides a preliminary study of embedded computer vision (ECV) and design of a single common ECV platform using ARM-9 embedded processor. A few CV applications are also demonstrated on this platform, which share the same v FACULTY OF ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE UNIVERSITI TUNKU ABDUL RAHMAN Date: __________________ PERMISSION SHEET It is hereby certified that KENNY KHOO KUAN YEW (ID No: 06UIM02006) has completed this dissertation entitled "DESIGN AND