The paper briefly reviews certain aspects of the biological visual system and presents a smart vision sensor for the detection of higher-level features. The visual system processes information in a hierarchical manner starting from the retina up to the visual cortex. It decomposes the image in simple features (edges, orientation, line stops, corners, etc) using spatial and temporal information. At the higher level it integrates these primitive features, resulting in the recognition of complex objects. The sensor described in the paper is loosely modeled after the visual system and incorporates pixel level, programmable elements which extract orientation, end stops, corners and junctions from a line drawing. The architecture resembles a CNN-UM that can be programmed with a 30-bit word. The 16 x 16 pixels array detects these higher-level features in about 54 μseconds.