1. A computing system for determining computer vision features, comprising: a vision sensor comprising a plurality of pixels, the plurality of pixels arranged along at least a first dimension and a second dimension of a pixel array, each of the plurality of pixels capable of generating a signal based on light incident upon the respective pixel from the plurality of pixels; hierarchical computation generation hardware coupled to the vision sensor and a memory buffer, and configured to maintain a representation of the plurality of pixels of the pixel array as a hierarchy of computations in the memory buffer, each level above a lower level of the hierarchy of computations comprising one or more values representing a computation based on values from the lower level of the hierarchy and each value of the one or more values of each level of the hierarchy of computations being associated with a region in an image captured by the pixel array, and the one or more values for the each level representing the entire image captured by the pixel array; the hierarchical computation generation hardware further configured to update levels of the hierarchy of computations above a given level based on a new value at the given level only if the new value differs from a previous value by an amount greater than a reference threshold and not updating the levels of the hierarchy of computations above the given level if there is no value among values of the given level that has changed greater than the reference threshold; and computer vision feature computation hardware configured to compute a computer vision feature based on the updated hierarchy of computations.