This paper presents a 211 GOPS/W real-time object recognition processor with network-on-chip (NoC). The chip integrates 8 linearly connected SIMD clusters with 8 4-way VLIW processing elements (PEs) per cluster. The SIMD/MIMD dual-mode object recognition processor exploits both data-level and object-level parallelism based on the NoC configuration. The 8-way SIMD PE cluster is optimized for data-intensive object recognition tasks. Packet-based power management scheme is employed for low power consumption. The proposed processor takes 36 mm 2 in 0.13 mum CMOS process and achieves a peak performance of 96 GOPS at 200 MHz with 392 mW power consumption.