Patent ID: 8825364

Claim:
A vehicle location recognition apparatus comprising: a vehicle location information acquisition unit for acquiring vehicle location information representing a current location of a vehicle; a road information acquisition unit for acquiring road information representing connecting roads, each road being represented by a plurality of links; a link determination unit for determining, on the basis of vehicle location information links actually traveled by the vehicle through the branch point by use of learned priority information; a history information generation unit for generating, on the basis of the links determined by the link determination unit to have been traveled by the vehicle, travel history information representing a route traveled by the vehicle in passing through a branch point of the links, the history information generation unit storing the links of the route traveled by the vehicle in passing through the branch point and extending from the branch point through a predetermined storage section and, if the stored route includes a jump in location which occurs as a movement from one of the links to another link not connected directly to the one link in the road information, uses the links actually traveled by the vehicle through the branch point to generate travel history information representing the determined actually traveled links; a history information storage unit for storing the travel history information generated by the history information generation unit; and a learning unit for generating, on the basis of the travel history information stored by the history information storage unit, the learned priority information, which is determined on the basis of the travel history information and which represents priorities determined on the basis of ratios for the number of times each one of the plurality of links branching at the branch point has been traveled by the vehicle relative to the total number of times all of the plurality of links have been traveled by the vehicle.