Software-Defined Radio (SDR) receiver has the ability of operating in a multi-mode environment and has wide applications. However, efficient recognition of the currently active modulation system in real-time is a major problem faced by many applications. In this paper, an efficient method for the recognition of modulation system in a SDR receiver is proposed. The method is a classical two-stage approach based on (i) decision feature extraction and (ii) modulation system classification. In the first stage, decision features are extracted by the use of digital quadrature polyphase filter. In the second stage, an efficient parallel decision algorithm is proposed to classify the active modulation type. This proposed algorithm is proof to be more efficient than the conventional type of decision-tree approach. The complete recognition system is implemented using MATLAB. Simulation result shows that the proposed method achieved good robustness even with the presence of band-limited Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). The overall successful recognition rate of 98.5% can be achieved even at a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 8 dB.