The channel coding is a key link in modern digital communication systems, which effectively improves the reliability of communication. In view of the problem of the categories detection of channel coding, this paper puts forward a method of detecting channel coding categories using the correlation characteristics of coding sequence. The method constructs the correlation characteristics matrix for coding sequence, and judges the channel coding categories the sequence adopted through the simplified results of the matrix. The simulation result shows that this method can effectively detect channel coding categories while requires a small amount of data and simple calculation.