A vehicle periphery monitoring device includes an image processing target area setting portion (21) configured to set an image processing target area in the captured image based on a distance detected by a radar between object and a vehicle; a directivity extracting portion (22) configured to perform a differential filtering on each of pixels in the image processing target area in a predefined direction; an image processing target area correcting portion (23) configured to extract a feature region having a feature amount of a pedestrian's head and to correct a range of the image processing target area based on a position of the feature region; a contour extracting portion (24) configured to extract a contour of the image portion included in the corrected image processing target area; and an object type discriminating portion (25) configured to discriminate a type of the monitoring object based on the extracted contour.