1. A lane mark recognizing apparatus comprising: an image capturing unit mounted on a vehicle that captures an image including a driving road in front of the vehicle; an edge extractor that executes an edge extracting process on the image captured by the image capturing unit; a lane mark recognizer that recognizes lane marks based on edges extracted by the edge extractor; and a lane mark candidate determiner that detects edges, which exist within a short-distance area in front of the vehicle, from among the edges extracted by the edge extractor, and determines lane mark candidates based on the detected edges together with edges that exist in a long-distance area located in front of said vehicle farther than the short-distance area and which are contiguous to the detected edges, wherein the lane mark recognizer executes a lane mark recognizing process on the lane mark candidates determined by the lane mark candidate determiner.