Patent ID: 7599521

Claim:
A vehicle vicinity monitoring apparatus for detecting a position of an object in the vicinity of a vehicle from images obtained by a plurality of imaging units that are aligned in parallel with a width direction of the vehicle and mounted on a front part of said vehicle, comprising: an image area setting unit for setting an image area to a predetermined area in each of the images obtained by said imaging units, the image area being used to detect an object therefrom, which is disposed in front of the imaging units; an object extracting unit for detecting an object in the image area set by said image area setting unit; an image area correcting unit for vertically correcting, based on information with respect to the object detected by said object extracting unit of one of the imaging units, the image areas set by said image area setting units of the rest of the imaging units; an optical axis shift detecting unit for detecting a shift of optical axes of said imaging units; and a mounted state detecting unit for detecting mounted states of said imaging units on the vehicle; wherein said image area correcting unit corrects the image area set by said image area setting unit based on the shift of the optical axes detected by said optical axis shift detecting unit and the mounted states detected by said mounted state detecting unit.