This paper presents an original method using colour histograms for flaw detection in automated industrial inspection. The colour histogram of an image is constructed by mapping the pixels into a colour space composed of discrete 3D colour intervals called colour bins. Swain [9] demonstrated the use of colour histograms to locate a target object in an image. The colour histograms of the target object and of the image are used to create a ratio histogram. The ratio histogram is back projected onto the image by replacing each pixel in the image by the value of the ratio histogram bin into which it falls. The resulting image is smoothed to reduce the effects of noise. The peak is found and taken to be the location of the target object. The method presented in this paper also uses histogram back projection; its novelty is in the construction of the colour profile, which is back projected in the place of the ratio histogram. The colour profile is the result of presenting the system with a s...