Various shadows are one of main factors that cause errors in vision based vehicle detection. In this paper, two simple methods, land mark based method and BS & Edge method, are proposed for vehicle detection and shadow rejection. In the experiments, the accuracy of vehicle detection is higher than 96%, during which the shadows arisen from roadside buildings grew considerably. Based on these two methods, vehicle counting, tracking, classification, and speed estimation are achieved so that real-time traffic parameters concerning traffic flow can be extracted to describe the load of each lane.