The invention discloses a method for automatically detecting a three-dimensional television (3DTV) video program format, which comprises the following steps of: 1, acquiring a frame image and judging whether the entropy of the frame image is greater than a first preset threshold value in the preset interval, if so, continuously executing, otherwise, returning; 2, equally dividing the frame image into n blocks; 3, respectively calculating linear correlation coefficients among the n blocks; 4, respectively judging whether a correlation coefficient of any two adjacent images in the n blocks is greater than a second preset threshold value, if so, adding one to a first counter, otherwise, adding one to a second counter; and 5, repeating 1 to (4m-1) times, if the first counter is m, the left and right three-dimensional format is obtained, if the second counter is m, the upper and lower three-dimensional format is obtained, otherwise, a two-dimensional format is obtained. In the method, whether the color is rich is judged according to the entropy of the image and the similarity between the images is judged according to the correlation coefficients between the image blocks, so the method is accurate and rapid.