We developed an embedded vision system that can accelerate the basic image processing functions for mobile robot navigation with compact hardware featuring low power consumption. The system is composed of a digital signal processor (DSP) and a dedicated LSI for low-level image processing, specifically for spatial filtering, feature extraction, and block matching operations. The image processing LSI has a dedicated systolic array processor consisting of 64 processing elements to accelerate basic block operations for image feature calculation and correlation-based image matching. The power consumption is only 10 W, about one-seventh that of a typical Pentium 4 personal computer, but the processing speed for correlation matching is roughly three times faster than such a system. With this vision system, we implemented a stereo-vision based navigation algorithm on our mobile service robot and performed a visual navigation experiment in a building hallway