A parking assisting apparatus includes an imaging unit acquiring image information corresponding to an image of surroundings of a vehicle, an image processing section recognizing a feature shape in the image by processing the image information, an obstacle detecting section acquiring positional-relationship information corresponding to a positional relationship between the vehicle and an obstacle present around a parking space, and a manner-of-parking selecting section selecting a manner of parking the vehicle in the parking space from manner candidates including perpendicular parking and parallel parking based on the feature shape and the positional-relationship information. The manner-of-parking selecting section selects the manner of parking from the manner candidates by integrating a likelihood of each of the manner candidates based on the positional-relationship information with a likelihood of the manner candidate based on a recognition result to calculate final likelihoods of the respective manner candidates, and by comparing the calculated final likelihoods.