Abstract: Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are the development direction of future transportation systems. ITS can effectively reduce traffic load and environmental pollution and ensure traffic safety, which has been a concern in all countries. In the field of intelligent transportation, vehicle detection has always been a hot spot but a difficult matter. To further improve the generalization, robustness, and real-time performance of the intelligent transportation system for the recognition of vehicles and different vehicle types, this study proposes an improved vehicle detection algorithm and chooses a road in the city as the background of the article. According to the characteristics of the detection region, the data set is constructed pertinently and the data set size is reduced using a video frame extraction method, aiming at achieving better detection performance with less training cost. The updating method of cosine decay with warm-up (CD) learning rate is then changed. An Adam gradient compression (GC) based on GC is proposed to improve the training speed, detection accuracy, and generalization ability of the YOLO v4 algorithm. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, the trained network model is used to verify the quantitative vehicle type detection experiment of different density traffic flows after collecting the traffic flow information under actual road conditions. Experimental results show that the overall detection of the improved method is better than that of the original method. The accuracy rates of the network models trained by YOLO v4 and YOLO v4 GC CD under the blocking flow samples, synchronous flow samples, and free flow samples are 94.59% and 96.46%, 95.34% and 97.20%, 95.98%, and 97.88%, respectively. Simultaneously, the detection effect of YOLOV4 GC CD was verified at night and on rainy days with an accuracy rate of 92.06% and 95.51%, respectively.