Flood-fill techniques and architecture are disclosed. In accordance with one embodiment, the architecture comprises a hardware primitive with a software interface which collectively allow for both data-based and task-based parallelism in executing a flood-fill process. The hardware primitive is defined to do the flood-fill function and is scalable and may be implemented with a bitwise definition that can be tuned to meet power/performance targets, in some embodiments. In executing a flood-fill operation, and in accordance with an example embodiment, the software interface produces parallel threads and issues them to processing elements, such that each of the threads can run independently until done. Each processing element in turn accesses a flood-fill hardware primitive, each of which is configured to flood a seed inside an N×M image block. In some cases, processing element commands to the flood-fill hardware primitive(s) can be queued and acted upon pursuant to an arbitration scheme.