Traffic congestion has been an emerging issue when it comes to problems faced by commuters on road on a daily basis. It leads to loss of time, money, and fuel when one is stuck in a traffic jam. This has led to the need of more path-breaking technologies in the field of intelligent transport systems (ITS). Today, a lot of data are available which can be used to extract important information and perform the desired analysis. With CCTV surveillance cameras at almost every traffic pole, information like count of vehicles can be used to analyze the traffic patterns at a particular location. In this paper, different methods have been used to get the accurate count of vehicles and their performances have been analyzed. Popular image processing method background subtraction and deep learning algorithms: R-CNN, Fast R-CNN and Faster R-CNN have been implemented. © 2020, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.