Patent ID: 7561719

Claim:
A vehicle surroundings monitoring apparatus that extracts a body present in the surroundings of a vehicle as an object, based on an image captured by an infrared imaging device, comprising: a binarized object extraction device that extracts a binarized object from image data obtained by binarizing a gray scale image of the image; an aspect ratio calculation device that calculates an aspect ratio of a region that includes at least a portion of the binarized object extracted by the binarized object extraction device; and an object type determination device that determines a type of the object based on the aspect ratio calculated by the aspect ratio calculation device, wherein: the aspect ratio calculation device calculates the aspect ratio based on a vertical width which is defined as a vertical width of an area of the region, the area where a vertical average luminance projection is more than an average of the vertical average luminance projection, and a horizontal width which is defined as a horizontal width of an area of the region, the area where a horizontal average luminance projection is more than an average of the horizontal average luminance projection; the vertical average luminance projection is defined as a fluctuation of an average value of luminance value in relation to a horizontal position of the region along a vertical direction, and the horizontal average luminance projection is defined as a fluctuation of an average value of luminance value in relation to a vertical position of the region along a horizontal direction; and the object type determination device determines the object as a manmade structure when the aspect ratio is more than a predetermined value.