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, an obstacle determination
device that determines whether or not another body being an obstacle is
present between the infrared imaging device and the binarized object, a
height calculation device that calculates a height dimension of the
binarized object based on the height dimension of the obstacle on the
gray scale image when it is determined that an obstacle is present in a
determination result of the obstacle determination device and an object
type determination device that determines a type of the object based on
the height dimension of the binarized object.