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, which includes a binarized object
extraction device that extracts a binarized object from image data
obtained by binarizing a gray scale image of the image; an aspect ratio
calculation device that calculates an aspect ratio of a region that
includes at least a portion of the binarized object extracted by the
binarized object extraction device; and an object type determination
device that determines a type of the object based on the aspect ratio
calculated by the aspect ratio calculation device.