For a visual inspectio system to be viable, it must in general achieve the same or lower costs as those incurred by manual methods, it must have a reasonable inspection rate, and it must be reliable and maintainable : for the visual inspection system, inspection at high speed, flexibility for variety of products, and low cost are needed. In order to solve these problems, we propose the visual inspection algorithm by divide-and-conquer technique using the pyramid data structure and the development of simplified pattern matching method. By this method we can reduce the number of data required to compare with patterns and make the inspection time short.