The focus of this work is on the problem of feature selection and classification for on-road vehicle detection. In particular, we propose using quantized Haar wavelet features and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for rear-view vehicle detection. Wavelet features are particularly attractive for vehicle detection because they form a compact representation, encode edge information, capture information from multiple scales, and can be computed efficiently. Traditionally, methods using wavelet features for classification truncate the coefficients by keeping only the ones with largest magnitude. We believe that the actual values of the wavelet coefficients are not very important for vehicle detection. In fact, the coefficient magnitudes indicate local oriented intensity differences, information that could be very different even for the same vehicle under different lighting conditions. Therefore, we argue and demonstrate experimentally that the actual coefficient values are less importan...