Current techniques for road-traffic monitoring rely on sensors which have limited capabilities, are costly and disruptive to install. The use of video cameras coupled with computer vision techniques offers an attractive alternative to current sensors. Video based traffic monitoring systems are now being considered key points of advanced traffic management systems. In this paper, we propose the new method which extract the traffic information using video camera. The proposed method uses an adaptive updating scheme for background in order to reduce the false alarm rate due to various noises in images. also, the proposed extraction method of traffic information calculates the traffic volume ratio of vehicles passing through predefined detection area, which is defined by the length of profile occupied by cars over that of overall detection area. Then the ratio is used to define 8 different states of traffic and to interpret the state of vehicle flows. The proposed method is verified by an experiment using CCTV traffic data from urban area.