An optical velocity measuring apparatus which can restrict the effect of rotational motion of a moving object and estimate a velocity of its own with high accuracy, for a moving object with no wheels or a moving object of which the wheels slip includes an imager, provided in a moving object, for imaging a traveling surface such that a shift amount of each pixel at a time when an imaging target surface has shifted varies depending on a position of the pixel within an image, and the optical velocity measuring apparatus acquires a pixel shift amount gradient, which is a change in the shift amount of each pixel with respect to a predetermined axis, from a plurality of images captured by an image capturing device in a time series and a velocity of the moving object from the pixel shift amount gradient is acquired.