Patent ID: 7586400

Claim:
A vehicle surroundings monitoring apparatus which detects a monitored object around a vehicle from images taken by a single camera mounted on the vehicle, said apparatus comprising: a monitored object extraction process unit which extracts an image portion of the monitored object from the image taken by the camera; a rate-of-change calculation process unit which calculates a rate of change in size of the image portion of an identical monitored object extracted by the monitored object extraction process unit from a plurality of images taken by the camera at predetermined time intervals; and an arrival time estimation process unit which estimates vehicle arrival time which is the time to arrival of the monitored object at the vehicle based on the rate of change; wherein the rate-of-change calculation process unit regards an image portion of the monitored object extracted from one of the plurality of images taken by the camera at the predetermined time intervals as a standard image, calculates a correlation degree with an image portion of the monitored object in the other image by enlarging or reducing the standard image at a predetermined ratio, and calculates an enlargement ratio or a reduction ratio of the standard image at the highest correlation degree as the rate of change.