Night driving is one of the major factors which affects traffic safety. Althoughdetecting oncoming vehicles at night time is a challenging task, it may improve trafficsafety. If the oncoming vehicle is recognised in good time, this will motivate drivers tokeep their eyes on the road. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to detectvehicles at night based on the employment of a single onboard camera. This system isbased on detecting vehicle headlights by recognising their shapes via an SVM classifierwhich was trained for this purpose. A pairing algorithm was designed to pair vehicleheadlights to ensure that the two headlights belong to the same vehicle. A multi-objecttracking algorithm was invoked to track the vehicle throughout the time the vehicle isin the scene. The system was trained with 503 single objects and tested using 144 587single objects which were extracted from 1410 frames collected from 15 videos and 27moving vehicles. It was found that the accuracy of recognition was 97.9% and the vehiclerecognition rate was 96.3% which indicates clearly the high robustness attained by thissystem.