A 66 fps 38 mW nearest neighbor matching processor for real-time object recognition has been fabricated in 0.13 mum CMOS technology. It consists of RISC processing core, pre-fetch DMA, and two independent sets of logic merged memories. Based on hierarchical vector quantization (H-VQ) algorithm, implemented processor achieves 22.5X cycle time reduction in matching process without any accuracy loss in VQ operation. As a result, 66 fps frame rate is obtained for QVGA (320times240 pixels) video images with 5632-entry database.