HECTOR is a parallel multistage homopolymer spectrum based error corrector for 454 sequencing data. In this algorithm, for the first time we have investigated a novel homopolymer spectrum based approach to handle homopolymer insertions or deletions, which are the dominant sequencing errors in 454 short-reads. We have evaluated the performance of HECTOR, in terms of correction quality, runtime and parallel scalability, using both simulated and real short-read datasets. This performance has been further compared to that of Coral, a state-of-the-art error corrector which is based on multiple sequence alignment. Our evaluations reveal that HECTOR demonstrates comparable correction quality to Coral, but runs 2.9× faster on average.