Vehicle detection and tracking applications play an important role for civilian and military applications such as in highway traffic surveillance control, management and urban traffic planning. Vehicle detection process on road are used for vehicle tracking, counts, average speed of each individual vehicle, traffic analysis and vehicle categorizing objectives and may be implemented under different environments changes. In this review, we present a concise overview of image processing methods and analysis tools which used in building these previous mentioned applications that involved developing traffic surveillance systems. More precisely and in contrast with other reviews, we classified the processing methods under three categories for more clarification to explain the traffic systems.