For intelligent robots, a robot vision system is usually required to perform three-dimensional (3-D) position estimation as well as object recognition at high speeds. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for 3-D object recognition and position estimation for the implementation of a VLSI processor The principle of the algorithm is based on model matching between an input image and models stored in memory. Because of enormous computation time, the development of a high-performance VLSI processor is essential. Highly parallel architecture is introduced in the VLSI processor to reduce the latency. As a result of highly parallel computing, the computational time is 10000 times faster than that of a 28.5 MIPS workstation.