1. A vehicle surrounding-area monitoring apparatus comprising: a notable video image generation unit generating a narrow view-field region as a notable video image, the narrow view-field region being part of a video image of an area surrounding a vehicle obtained by an imaging unit; an obstacle recognition unit recognizing an obstacle in the area surrounding the vehicle; an obstacle region calculation unit calculating an obstacle region, the obstacle region being a region, in the video image, of the obstacle recognized by the obstacle recognition unit; a notable obstacle image generation unit generating the video region as a notable obstacle image if the obstacle region is contained in an image region that is partially overlapping with the narrow view-field region and is a part of the video image; and an image merge unit generating a surrounding-area monitoring display image comprising the notable video image and the notable obstacle image.