Edge detection operation is an essential part in the field of image processing. There are few ways to improve the performance of edge detection. This paper proposes a FPGA-based approach Sobel edge detection. An image is captured by a CMOS camera and converted into RGB color space and the image is converted into grayscale to obtain image intensity for edge detection. The proposed Sobel edge detection operator is model using of Finite State Machine (FSM) which executes a matrix area gradient operation to determine the level of variance through different of pixels and display the result on a monitor. The whole process is performed in the hardware level that utilizes the resources of FPGA board. The result shows good performance of edge detection with 27MHz clock operation. ©2008 IEEE.