VEHICLE DETECTION APPARATUS AND VEHICLE DETECTION METHOD

There are provided a vehicle detection apparatus and a vehicle detection method which are capable of detecting a sound source even when a plurality of vehicles are traveling simultaneously or when there are noises produced from something other than the desired vehicle and calculating the location in the vehicle traveling direction and the lane direction of the sound source and the number of passing vehicles. In the vehicle detection apparatus and the vehicle detection method, noises are collected by a microphone array (402) comprising a plurality of microphones arranged in the form of a matrix in the same plane, the outputs thereof are sampled periodically with time windows in a noise component matrix calculation section (122), the direction in the vehicle traveling direction and the lane direction of the sound source in each window is estimated in an &agr;-direction calculation section (410) and a &bgr;-direction calculation section (417), the vehicle is detected by the degree of similarity between the estimated directions in the vehicle traveling direction and traveling sound templates in a vehicle detection section (124), and the estimated directions in the lane direction are counted for each lane and the location in the lane direction of the sound source is detected in a lane detection section (312).