Traditional methods of traffic accident detection and review are mainly through manual monitoring. To overcome the low efficiency and poor performance of those methods, we proposed a vehicle abnormal event detection method based on the up-to-date video coding standard HEVC(High-efficiency video coding). Firstly, we extract the motion vector information from HEVC bit-stream to proceed cumulative iteration and median filtering. After that, we calculate the motion intensity value of the moving objects based on block partition and motion vector information, and then extract the moving targets according to the motion intensity value and eight-neighbored region method. Finally, we detect the vehicle abnormal events from the video sequence using the space distance and motion intensity evaluation method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately detect the abnormal events in video sequence, especially for those videos with fast-moving objects and multiple moving targets.