The invention concerns a traffic surveillance system that is used to detect and track vehicles in video taken of a road from a low mounted camera. The inventors have discovered that even in heavily occluded scenes, due to traffic density or the angle of low mounted cameras capturing the images, at least one horizontal edge of the windshield is least likely to be occluded for each individual vehicle in the image. Thus, it is an advantage of the invention that the direct detection of a windshield on its own can be used to detect a vehicle in a single image. Multiple models are projected (206) onto an image with reference to different points in the image. The probability of each point forming part of a windshield is determined based on a correlation of the horizontal edges in the image with the horizontal edges of the windshield model referenced at that point (220). This probability of neighboring points is used to possible detect a vehicle in the image (224). Aspects of the invention include a method, software and traffic surveillance system.