Patent ID: 8139821

Claim:
A vehicle periphery monitoring device, comprising: a first imaging device mounted on a vehicle and configured to monitor a periphery of the vehicle; a second imaging device mounted on the vehicle having an overlapped imaging range with the first imaging device; and a computer configured to receive imaging data from the first and second imaging devices, wherein the computer includes: a target object extracting unit configured to extract a first image section of a target object in real space from a first image imaged by the first imaging unit at a predetermined time; a corresponding image extracting unit configured to extract a second image section correlated to the first image section from a second image imaged by the second imaging unit at the predetermined time; a parallax calculating unit configured to calculate a parallax between the first image section and the second image section; a parallax variation rate calculating unit configured to calculate a parallax variation rate per predetermined time interval on the basis of the parallax calculated by the parallax calculating unit in time series for the target object; a velocity detecting unit configured to detect a vehicular velocity of the vehicle; and a first distance calculating unit configured to calculate a distance from the vehicle to the target object on the basis of the parallax variation rate and the vehicular velocity, wherein the first distance calculating unit is configured to shift a sampling interval to calculate a theoretical parallax variation rate on the basis of a theoretical time-series parallax data calculated on assumption that a mounting behavior of the first imaging unit and the second imaging unit to the vehicle satisfies a predetermined condition and the vehicle is travelling at the vehicular velocity detected by the velocity detecting unit, and calculates the distance from the vehicle to the target object on the basis of the theoretical time-series parallax data in a sampling interval wherein the theoretical parallax variation rate matches the parallax variation rate calculated by the parallax variation rate calculating unit.