1. A vehicle detection apparatus for using a camera image from a camera for monitoring the front of one's own vehicle and detection data from a radar for detecting position of an object in front of said own vehicle and distance to said object from said own vehicle to recognize a front-going vehicle among photographed objects with object images contained in said camera image; said vehicle detection apparatus comprising: image extracting means for extracting images in a specified area inside said camera image centered around positions of objects in the detection data from said radar; binarization means for binarizing the extracted images by said image extracting means; matching means for matching patterns between an image figure contained in the binarized image and reference images having a horizontally elongated part with downward protrusions from both end parts of said horizontally elongated part; and judging means for judging an image figure as a figure of a front-going vehicle if said matching means concludes that said image figure matches one of said reference images over a specified percentage.