Patent ID: 8213682

Claim:
A feature information collecting apparatus, comprising: a memory that stores road information that represents a road network by connection relationships between nodes that correspond to intersections and links that correspond to roads linking the intersections; and a controller that: acquires vehicle position information that represents a current position of a vehicle; acquires image information of a vicinity of the vehicle; carries out image recognition processing of a target feature that is included in the image information to determine a recognition position of the target feature; stores recognition position information in the memory that is based on the acquired vehicle position information and that represents the determined recognition position of the target feature; determines an estimated position of the target feature based on set of a plurality of stored recognition position information for the target feature, the plurality of stored recognition position information for the target feature being stored due to the target feature being subject to image recognition processing a plurality of times; and corrects a position of a stored node based on the estimated position of the target feature and an estimated position of another target feature, the target feature and the other target feature surrounding the node and being disposed at substantially equal distances from the stored node.