Identifying and locating objects in images and videos, including elements like traffic signs, vehicles, buildings, and people, constitutes a fundamental and demanding task in computer vision, known as object detection. Due to the higher computing complexity of this technique and the large amount of data carried by the video signal, it is nearly impossible for ordinary general-purpose processors GPPs or CPUs to run these techniques in real-time, especially for embedded systems applications. Therefore, special hardware that can acquire, control, or execute in parallel is required. These specialized hardware systems include Digital Signal Processors DSPs, Field Programmable Gate Arrays FPGAs, Visual Processing Units VPUs, Tensor Processing Units TPUs, Neural Processing Units NPUs or Graphics Processing Units GPUs. This work presents the benefits of accelerating traditional object detection methods on a high-end embedded system, the Jetson Nano Developer Kit. This single computer board is equipped with the Tegra K1 System on Chip SoC, which is composed of a quad-core ARM A15 and 192 cores of Kepler-embedded GPU. Computing acceleration was ensured via the use of the CUDA OpenCV library for both the Histogram of Oriented Gradients HOG and the Haar Cascade Classifier. For VGA resolution, results reveal that the GPU implementation on this embedded system is 1.4 \(\times \) faster than the CPU for the HOG method and 2 \(\times \) for the Haar Cascade Classifier method.