This research features efficient detection of obstacles, especially vehicles, in the forward direction of navigation for the development of unmanned automous vehicle. We separate image regions into ground and non-ground planes using the Helmholtz shearing technique in order to reliably exclude regions that do not contain obstacles. We propose a computationally simple and efficient method for the detection of vehicles in the forward direction by analysis of horizontally and vertically projected histograms of residual disparity map obtained from Helmholtz shearing. We have experimented the proposed method on real outdoor stereo data. Experimental results show that our method gives accurate detection of forward vehicles and is computationally very efficient.