Defect inspection of specular curved surface is a challenging job. Taking steel balls for example, a new method based on reflected pattern integrity recognition is put forward. The specular steel ball surface will totally reflect the patterns when it is placed inside a dome-shaped light source, whose inner wall is modified by patterns with certain regular. Distortion or intermittence of reflected pattern will occur at the defective part, which indicates the pattern has lost its integrity. Based on the integrity analysis of reflected pattern images？ surface defects can be revealed. In this paper, a set of concentric circles are used as the pattern and an image processing algorithm is customized to extract the surface defects. Results show that the proposed method is effective for the specular curved surface defect inspection
