Vehicle surroundings monitoring apparatus, vehicle surroundings monitoring method, and vehicle surroundings monitoring program

Abstract

A vehicle surroundings monitoring apparatus, a vehicle surroundings monitoring method, and a vehicle surroundings monitoring program which can rapidly determine an object such as a pedestrian to be avoided which must be avoided from coming into contact with the vehicle from an image of the surroundings of the vehicle and can provide information to a driver or control the vehicle behaviors. The vehicle surroundings monitoring apparatus includes an object extraction process unit () which extracts objects existing around a vehicle () from images taken by infrared cameras (R,L), a pedestrian extraction process unit () which extracts a pedestrian from the extracted objects, a posture determination process unit () which determines the posture of the extracted pedestrian, an object-to-be-avoided determination process unit () which determines whether the extracted object is an object to be avoided which must be avoided from coming into contact with the vehicle () by executing a determination algorithm including at least a first determination process on the posture of the pedestrian determined by the posture determination process unit (), and a vehicle equipment control process unit () which controls equipment of the vehicle () at least according to the determination result of the object-to-be-avoided determination process unit ().