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.