Many day-to-day driving situations require that an operator of a motor vehicle guide the motor vehicle along a specific course and bring the vehicle to a stop at a specific location, for example in a parking bay or at a loading platform. To assist a vehicle operator in such situations, a method and a suitable device for implementing this method, include detecting the potential target objects in the image data of an image sensor and identifying the potential target objects as potential destinations in a multi-stage exclusionary method, whereupon a trajectory describing an optimized travel path is computed at least in relation to the most proximate destination. By using the multi-stage exclusionary method according to the present invention, it is possible to reliably identify potential destinations in complex image scenarios solely on the basis of their geometric form, even when the destinations have not been encoded by specific symbols.