This article presents an adaptive hardware architecture for high-performance object detection using Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) features in combination with Supported Vector Machines (SVM). This architecture can adapt to various bit-width representations of HOG features by using the quantization technique. The HOG features can be represented from 8 bits to 4 bits to remove the bubble in the processing pipeline and reduce the memory footprint. As a result, the overall throughput is robustly increased as the number of bits decreases. Moreover, we propose a new cell-reused strategy to speed up the system throughput and reduce memory footprint. The proposed architecture has been implemented in TSMC 65nm technology with a maximum operating frequency of 500MHz and throughput of 3.98Gbps. The total hardware area cost is about 167KGEs and 212kb SRAMs. © 2022 IEEE.