Intelligent traffic systems represent one of the crucial domains in today’s world, aiming to enhance traffic management efficiency and road safety. However, current intelligent traffic systems still face various challenges, particularly in the realm of target detection. These challenges include adapting to complex traffic scenarios and the lack of precise detection for multiple objects. To address these issues, we propose an innovative approach known as YOLOv8-SnakeVision. This method introduces Dynamic Snake Convolution, Context Aggregation Attention Mechanisms, and the Wise-IoU strategy within the YOLOv8 framework to enhance target detection performance. Dynamic Snake Convolution assists in accurately capturing complex object shapes and features, especially in cases of target occlusion or overlap. The Context Aggregation Attention Mechanisms allow the model to better focus on critical image regions and effectively integrate information, thus improving its ability to recognize obscured targets, small objects, and complex patterns. The Wise-IoU strategy combines dynamic non-monotonic focusing mechanisms, aiming to more precisely regress target bounding boxes, particularly for low-quality examples. We validate our approach on the BDD100K and NEXET datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLOv8-SnakeVision excels in various complex road traffic scenarios. It not only enhances small object detection but also strengthens the ability to recognize multiple targets. This innovative method provides robust support for the development of intelligent traffic systems and holds the promise of achieving further breakthroughs in future applications.