An obstacle detecting unit detects whether an obstacle exists in an area surrounding a vehicle in the direction a camera installed on the vehicle is pointed. If the obstacle is determined to have a portion at a predetermined height above a road surface with which the vehicle may make initial contact when the vehicle moves toward the obstacle, a virtual projection surface is set to the height of the predicted contact portion and viewpoint conversion processing is performed so as to project pixels of an image captured by the camera onto the virtual projection plane. In this way, the height of the projection plane and the height of the predicted contact portion match each other and the distance between the predicted contact portion and the vehicle is accurately expressed on a bird's-eye view image resulting from the viewpoint conversion.