Support vector machine (SVM) is a new sort of machine learning method based on Structure Risk Minimization (SRM) principle, which has high generalization capability. Many problems with small samples, nonlinearity or high dimension in pattern recognition could be solved by the method. In this paper, the traffic data on freeway were taken as research objects and an information fusion algorithm based on SVM about freeway incident detection was proposed. A SVM was trained and tested using the data obtained from the simulation under the condition of incident and non-incident. Compared with the multi-layer feed forward neural network (MLF) algorithm trained with the same data, the simulation results showed that the SVM offers a lower misclassification rate, higher correct detection rate and lower false alarm, and it can improve the detection performance.