The invention requests to protect a vehicle detection and tracking method based on monocular vision, and belongs to the field of machine vision. The method comprises the steps that in a vehicle detection stage, a rod driving region is determined by combining interest region extracting, self-adaptive Canny edge detection and lane line detection, then a vehicle bottom shadow is obtained by means of local tonal value statistics and a thresholding method in which a maximum between-class variance method is used twice in an integrated manner, furthermore, a supposed vehicle is proposed, and then the supposed vehicle is verified through a texture description co-occurrence matrix method; and in a vehicle tracking stage, an improved algorithm combining Kalman filtering with Cam shift is adopted to carry out multi-target tracking, then new target judging, whether searching is successful, and whether a vehicle is out of an edge are used as three standards, and if a new target is detected twice, the new target is processed as a new tracking target, and the tracking target is updated continuously. By adopting the method, vehicle detection and multi-target tracking under a dynamic background are realized, and the instantaneity, the accuracy and the reliability are relatively high.