Patent Document ID: 8289391
Application ID: 12859020
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. Apparatus for vehicle surroundings monitoring that assists checking of surroundings of a vehicle by a driver by displaying an image captured outside of the vehicle, the apparatus comprising: an imaging unit that captures a predetermined range around the vehicle with mutually differing exposure amounts; an image recognition unit that performs recognition of a predefined recognition target by image processing plural images with mutually differing exposure amounts that are captured by the imaging unit; an image compositing unit that generates a composite image from the images based on a recognition result of the image recognition unit; and a display unit that displays the composite image composited by the image compositing unit, wherein the image compositing unit compares, with each or one another, plural images within which the recognition target has been recognized by the image recognition unit, extracts from each of the plural images an image area where accuracy of the recognition target is high, and generates the composite image using the extracted image areas, and wherein the image compositing unit creates, in accordance with the accuracy of the recognition target and a distance from an area where the recognition target is detected, a weight map defining a proportion with which each of the image areas is to be used in the generation of the composite image, and generates the composite image in accordance with the weight map.