The invention discloses a vehicle ranging method based on monocular vision, and belongs to the field of target detection and ranging. The method comprises the steps of installing a monocular camera on a vehicle, measuring the height and the pitching angle of the camera, and determining focal distance parameters of the camera; acquiring a video image in an expressway environment; performing preliminary de-noising and filtration on the video image by adopting Gaussian filtration; performing interest region segmentation preprocessing before detection of a target vehicle on the video image; performing vehicle detection in a segmented video image region, wherein an Haar feature for increasing a wheel feature and a tail feature is adopted in the target vehicle detection, so as to effectively improve the accuracy of target vehicle identification; and measuring the distance of the target vehicle, wherein a ranging method based on pin-hole imaging is adopted within a short-distance range, while a ranging method of data fitting is adopted within a long-distance range, so that the error rate is reduced, and a real-time ranging effect can be achieved. The method has the advantages of high detection speed, high accuracy, strong real-time property and low cost.