Patent ID: 8547416

Claim:
A signal processing apparatus processing a video signal and an audio signal in synchronization with the video signal, the signal processing apparatus comprising: generating means for generating information indicating a probability of a certain subject appearing in an image on the basis of the video signal that is input, wherein the probability comprises a measure of the likelihood that the certain subject appears in the image; determining means for determining whether the certain subject appears in the image on the basis of the information generated by the generating means; directional characteristic varying means for, if the determining means determines that the certain subject appears in the image, varying a directional characteristic of the audio signal so as to increase the level of the audio signal collected from the direction of the subject and/or to decrease the levels of the audio signals collected from directions other than the direction of the subject; and frequency characteristic varying means for, if the determining means determines that the certain subject appears in the image, varying a frequency characteristic of the audio signal so as to increase the level of the frequency band including a sound emitted from the subject and/or to decrease the levels of frequency bands other than the frequency band including the sound emitted from the subject, wherein the generating means includes: extracting means for extracting an area including the pixels of a certain color from the image corresponding to the input video signal, detecting means for detecting a characteristic value pattern of the pixels in the area extracted by the extracting means on the basis of a luminance or a color difference of the pixels in the area, storing means for storing in advance the characteristic value pattern detected from the image including the certain subject, and calculating means for comparing the characteristic value pattern detected by the detecting means with the characteristic value pattern stored in the storing means to calculate a correlation coefficient between the characteristic value patterns, and wherein the correlation coefficient calculated by the calculating means is generated as the information indicating the probability of the certain subject appearing in the image.