MONITORING APPARATUS

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To reduce labor burden on a monitoring person who wants to detect a difference for only a part of unit image group forming an entire image, and to enable rapidly and accurately detecting an change in state from a vast photographing range. SOLUTION: When a panoramic image generated by picking up a photographing range while sequentially changing a photographing direction is monitored, a desired image position is determined from the generated panoramic image, the difference in luminance level between one unit image forming unit image group centered at the designated image position and a unit image in the same direction which has been photographed before the unit image is sequentially detected, the difference in luminance level is compared with a predetermined threshold, and a predetermined information is displayed together with the generated panoramic image on a display 6 on the basis of this result of comparison. In this case, a region where the predetermined threshold is set at a large value and/or a region where the comparison is not performed are previously set for each unit image. COPYRIGHT: (C)2005,JPO&NCIPI