Abstract: Aiming at the problem of moving vehicle detection and recoginiton, this paper proposed a vehicle detection algorithm based on vehicle symmetrical FAST feature. Based on the vehicle symmetrical feature, a novel symmetrical FAST points extraction algorithm is presented by constructing FAST descriptor. Then the vehicle symmetrical features are extracted using this method, which is also used to locate the central position of vehicle. At last, the vehicle will be recognized combining with the shadow features of the target. The experiment results show that the proposed method can detect vehicle area accurately, which can reach an average accurate detection rate of 93.2%.