The texture of machined surfaces provides reliable information regarding the extent of tool wear. In this paper, we propose a structure-based approach to analyzing machined surfaces. The original surface images are first preprocessed by a Canny edge detector. A new connectivity-oriented fast Hough transform is then applied to the edge image to detect all the line segments. The distributions of the orientations and lengths of the line segments are used to determine tool wear. Through our experiments, we found a strong correlation between tool wear and features. The computational complexity of the fast Hough transform is also analyzed.