Patent ID: 7649442

Claim:
A vehicle detection apparatus for detecting vehicles traveling on a road with their lights turned on, comprising: an image capturing block that captures images of a road; a light spot detecting block that detects a light spot from an image captured by the image capturing block; a first coordinate detecting block that detects a first coordinate that indicates a vertical coordinate of the light spot in the captured image; a distance calculating block that calculates a distance to the light spot based on a horizontal length of the light spot in the captured image; a second coordinate detecting block that detects a second coordinate that indicates a vertical coordinate corresponding to the distance calculated by the distance calculating block, based on correlated data in which vertical coordinates and distances in a captured image are correlated to each other in advance; a pitching amount calculating block that calculates a pitching amount that indicates a difference between the first coordinate and the second coordinate in the captured image; and a vehicle light spot determining block that determines whether or not the light spot originates from a light spot of a vehicle, based on the pitching amount.