<p>It's a very difficult problem in general. I'd suggest the easier way is to constrain the problem as much as possible - control lighting, size orientation of cars to detect, no occlusions. </p>

<p>This constraining has been the philosophy image processing has followed up until recently. Now the trend is that instead of constraining your problem, obtain as a massive amount of example data to train a suppervised learning algorithm. In fact it's possible that you can use a pre-trained model that would let you detect cars as it has been suggested in a previous answer.</p>

<p>There has been recently massive progress in the area of object detection in images and here are a few of the state of the art approaches based on neural network based approaches:</p>

<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.2901" rel="nofollow">OverFeat</a></p></li>
<li><p>Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation (<a href="http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2014/papers/Girshick_Rich_Feature_Hierarchies_2014_CVPR_paper.pdf" rel="nofollow">R-CNN paper</a>)</p></li>
<li>Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition (<a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.4729" rel="nofollow">paper</a>)</li>
</ul>

<p>Framework that you could use include:</p>

<ul>
<li>Caffe: <a href="http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/" rel="nofollow">http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/</a></li>
<li>Theano</li>
<li>Torch</li>
</ul>
image based object detection and segemntation
<p>I am currently studying image processing and learning matlab for my project.<br/>
I needed to know that if there is any method to detect a car from traffic image or parking lot image and then segment it out from it.<br/>
I have googled a lot but mostly the content is video based and I dont know anything about image processing.
<br/>
language prefered : MATLAB<br/>
I am supposed to do this on images only not videos.</p>