Up to now the quality control of headlamp reflectors for vehicles has been visually made by inspectors (100%-control). The results depend on the daily constitution and attention of the inspectors. In many cases, those “human factors” lead to dissatisfactory quality control and rejects due to assumed defects. To avoid this and to accordingly reduce production costs and save the environment, a manufacturer of image processing systems and the three biggest manufacturers of car reflectors in Europe have initiated a project with the intention of solving the current problems. This article gives an overview of the project under the aspect of the economical automation of the whole process of the car reflector inspection. The project began in May 2002 and finished in December 2004 and was supported by the European Commission under the 5th framework competitive and sustainable growth, FINDER, project no. G6RD-CT-2002-00668 [EC-research-program, 2001, Fast intelligent defect recognition system (FINDER)]. The work described in this paper is a summary of the technical reports from the authors made for this project [4–8].