This paper presents an algorithm capable of detecting leading vehicles using a forward-looking camera. In fact, the accurate measurements of the contact locations of vehicles with road surface are prerequisites for the intelligent vehicle technologies based on a monocular vision. Relying on multistage processing of relevant edge features to the hypothesis generation of a vehicle, the proposed algorithm creates candidate positions being the left and right boundaries of vehicles, and searches for pairs to be vehicle boundaries from the potential positions by evaluating horizontal symmetry. The proposed algorithm is proven to be successful by experiments performed on images acquired by a moving vehicle.