A novel vision-based scheme of extracting real-time traffic information parameters is presented. The method is based on a region classification followed by a spatio-temporal image analysis. The detection region images for each traffic lane are classified into one of the three categories: the road, the vehicle, and the shadow, using statistical and structural features. Misclassification in a frame is corrected by using temporally correlated features of vehicles in the spatio-temporal image. Since only local images of detection regions are processed, the real-time operation of more than 30 frames per second is realized without using dedicated parallel processors, while ensuring detection performance robust to the variation of weather conditions, shadows, and traffic load.