The visual inspection of parts as they progress through die manufacturing process is an important task in all industries. Visual inspection, when performed by humans is a tedious task and is prone to error. This is precisely what makes it a good candidate for automation. Although computer vision systems have been around for over 30 years, die industrial applications of vision systems have become practical only in die last decade. Image processing and pattern recognition algorithms used in industrial vision systems are built upon a broad body of knowledge in vision research. But the use of computer vision systems in quality control has been limited to replicating die visual inspection tasks as they would be performed by a human operator. It is die contention of this study that when computerized inspection is employed, quality control inspection plans suitable for computerized inspection should also be employed to assure cost-effectiveness.