In this paper, we present a correlation scheme that incorporates a color ring-projection representation for the automatic inspection of defects in textured surfaces. The proposed color ring projection transforms a 2-D color image into a 1-D color pattern as a function of radius. For a search window of width W, data dimensionality is reduced from in the 2-D image to O(W) in the 1-D ring-projection space. The complexity of computing a correlation function is significantly reduced accordingly. Since the color ring-projection representation is invariant to rotation, the proposed method can be applied for both isotropic and oriented textures at arbitrary orientations. Experiments on regular textured surfaces have shown the efficacy of the proposed method.