Patent ID: 7266454

Claim:
An obstacle detection apparatus for an automotive vehicle, comprising: an image fetching section that fetches a situation of a forward detection zone in a form of an image; a noticeable object outputting section that outputs a positional information of an object to be noticeable for the vehicle; and an image processing section that performs an image processing for a region of the image fetching section on the basis of an output of the noticeable object outputting section to detect the object, the image processing section including a first technique mainly to detect the position of the object and a second technique mainly to track the object, the second technique detecting the object when the object detection by the first technique becomes not able to be carried out, wherein the second technique is a pattern matching that performs a tracking of the object from a correlation between a previously stored reference pattern and an output of the image fetching section and wherein the image processing section updates the reference pattern when the object detection by the first technique has succeeded.