Starting from the analysis of the specific requirements of automotive on-board equipments, this work presents a system for vehicle detection in images acquired from a moving vehicle. The system is composed of a pipeline of two different engines: a massively parallel architecture, PAPRICA, for the efficient execution of low-level image processing tasks, improved by the integration of a specific feature for direct data I/O; and a traditional serial architecture running medium-level tasks aimed to the detection of the vehicles' position in the image. A preliminary version of the system has been demonstrated on the MOB-LAB land vehicle, while a fully optimized one is currently under tuning in laboratory.