To reduce cost, to enhance reliability, and to simultaneously reduce a load on an arithmetic circuit.

An own vehicle position recognizing device is provided with an image-pickup means for picking up the image of the front of a vehicle, an edge emphasizing means 17 for performing an edge processing to the image obtained by the image-pickup means and to form an edge image with emphasized boundary, a straight line extracting means 18 to extract an edge straight line, based on the edge image, a division line detecting means 19 to detect a division line, when a distance between the edge straight lines is held within a prescribed range and a traffic division determining means 20 to judge a traffic division in which the vehicle is running, based on a detection result by the division line detecting means 19. The position of own vehicle is recognized simply by calculating the distance between the edge straight lines and judging whether the distance between the edge straight lines is held in the prescribed range or not.