Detecting the presence of target vehicles in front of a host vehicle by obtaining, using one or more visual sensors, an image of a field of view in front of a host vehicle and detecting, individually, a plurality of parts of one or more target vehicles in the obtained image. The detected plurality of parts, of the one or more target vehicles, are extracted from the obtained image and paired to form a complete target vehicle from the plurality of parts. The pairing is only performed on selective individual parts that overlap and have similar sizes indicating that they belong to the same target vehicle. A complete target vehicle is detected in response to forming a substantially complete target vehicle.