A hardware implementation of a computationally light, scale, and rotation invariant method for shape detection on FPGA is devised. The method is based on histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and average magnitude difference function (AMDF). AMDF is used as a decision module that measures the similarity/dissimilarity between HOG vectors of an image in order to classify the object. In addition, a simulation environment implemented on MATLAB is developed in order to overcome the time-consuming and tedious process of hardware verification on the FPGA platform. The simulation environment provides specific tools to quickly implement the proposed methods. It is shown that the simulator is able to produce exactly the same results as those obtained from FPGA implementation. The results indicate that the proposed approach leads to a shape detection method that is computationally light, scale, and rotation invariant, and, therefore, suitable for real-time industrial and robotic vision applications.