Patent ID: 7110021

Claim:
A vehicle surroundings monitoring device for producing a synthesized image showing the situation around a vehicle using images taken with at least one camera capturing the surroundings of the vehicle and presenting the synthesized image at a display unit, the device comprising: a position computation section operable to compute position information for a plurality of points in the images taken with the at least one camera, and operable to compute a precision of the position information, wherein said precision represents a degree of a measurement error; an image variable-synthesis section operable to produce a first synthesized image having a predetermined viewpoint which is different form a view point of the camera, based on the images taken with the at least one camera and the position information; an image fixed-synthesis section operable to produce a second synthesized image having a predetermined view point which is different from a view point of the camera, based on the images taken with the at least one camera by a predetermined method without use of the position information; and a synthesis scheme selection section operable to select either the first synthesized image or the second synthesized image based on the precision as the synthesized image to be presented at the display unit.