The invention discloses a method for detecting an illegal lane change of a vehicle based on a video detection technique. In traditional detection for traffic incidents, a large quantity of annular coil detectors need to be physically embedded under roads, or ultrasonic detectors need to be installed at road side. The method provided by the invention comprises the following steps of: step (1), detecting moving vehicles; step (2), positioning the moving vehicles based on a watershed algorithm; step (3), performing kalman filter tracking based on secondary characteristic matching, wherein the step (1) comprises the steps of preprocessing, background modeling, moving object extraction and postprocessing; and the step (2) comprises the steps of inputting established background and foreground binaryzation images, performing V-S watershed algorithm on the input background and foreground binaryzation images, setting internal memory for storing statistic information, establishing field chain tables, combining minimum zones and similar zones and outputting zone statistic information of a moving object. The method provided by the invention has strong antijamming capability, can effectively eliminate isolated noise and is beneficial to extracting vehicle foreground information in a more accurate way.