Television channel selection monitoring apparatus

摘要

A television channel selection monitoring apparatus (3) for identifying the broadcast channel to which a television receiver means (2) is tuned at any given time is disclosed. Instead of relying for the channel identification on the local oscillation frequency at the tuner of such television receiver means (2), the apparatus (3) of the present invention utilizes the recognition of the channel identification number superimposed on the video signal received through the selected channel so that the image of the superimposed channel number may appear, for a certain duration following the channel selection, at a predetermined area of the image corresponding to the video signal. For that purpose, the present apparatus (3) comprises: means (32) for extracting, out of the image corresponding to the video signal, an image section corresponding to said predetermined area; means (33) for identifying the channel number through the comparison of the extracted image section with the contents of dictionary storage (331) and the checking of the comparison output on the basis of reference channel numbers stored in a broadcast channel number storage (334). The present apparatus is useful particularly when the television receiver means (2) is adapted to communication satellite (CS) digital broadcast and CATV broadcast, to which the conventional tuner local oscillation-based channel identification technique is not applicable. <IMAGE>