An efficient vehicle detection approach is proposed for traffic surveillance images, which is based on information fusion of vehicle symmetrical contour and license plate position. The vertical symmetry axis of the vehicle contour in an image is. first detected, and then the vertical and the horizontal symmetry axes of the license plate are detected using the symmetry axis of the vehicle contour as a reference. The vehicle location in an image is determined using license plate symmetry axes and the vertical and the horizontal projection maps of the vehicle edge image. A dataset consisting of 450 images （15 classes of vehicles） is used to test the proposed method. The experimental results indicate that compared with the vehicle contour-based, the license plate location-based, the vehicle texture-based and the Gabor feature-based methods, the proposed method is the best with a detection accuracy of 90.7% and an elapsed time of 125 ms.
