Patent ID: 7277581

Claim:
A method for detecting a format of a digital video data sequence, comprising: producing a normalized field difference sequence based on a comparison of two fields in a sequence of data fields wherein producing the normalized field difference sequence includes: segmenting a first field of digital video data into a first plurality of pixel groups; segmenting a second field of digital video data into a second plurality of pixel groups; producing a plurality of pixel group scores based on differences between corresponding pixel groups in the first plurality of pixel groups and the second plurality of pixel groups; and determining a field difference metric between the first field of digital video data and the second field of digital video based on the plurality of pixel group scores; comparing the normalized field differences sequence with at least one test vector; and determining whether the received sequence of data fields is film mode or video mode based on the comparison of the normalized field difference sequence with the at least one test vector wherein the at least one test vector includes a plurality of film basis vectors and a plurality of video basis vectors, wherein the plurality of film basis vectors have zero assigned to each film basis vector location representing a repeat field, and one assigned to each film basis vector.