Adaptive vision-based vehicle detection methods, taking into account the lighting context of the images are disclosed. The methods categorize the scenes according to their lighting conditions and switch between specialized classifiers for different scene contexts. Four categories of lighting conditions have been identified using a clustering algorithm in the space of image histograms: Daylight, Low Light, Night, and Saturation. Trained classifiers are used for both Daylight and Low Light categories, and a tail-light detector is used for the Night category. Improved detection performance by using the provided context-adaptive methods is demonstrated. A night time detector is also disclosed.