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, including a binarized object extraction device that extracts a binarized object from image data obtained by binarizing a gray scale image of the image; a horizontal edge detection device that detects a horizontal edge in the gray scale image; a horizontal edge determination device that determines whether or not the horizontal edge detected by the horizontal edge detection device exists in a prescribed range from the top end or bottom end of the binarized object extracted by the binarized object extraction device; and an object type determination device that determines a type of object based on a determination result of the horizontal edge determination device.