Since the quality of the coated wires is in various applications dependant on the coating depth, accuracy of hole size of dies used for coating wires must be maintained precisely, in general within one micron. This paper proposes a new vision system which measures automatically the size and shape of small holes having diameters less than 1mm within an error limit of 1 micron. To quickly obtain the focused image, this paper proposes an estimation method of the camera position using only a couple of defocused hole images. It measures the distributions of light intensity around the image boundary and decides the direction and distance of a camera motion. The proposed system measures the size, shape distortion, inclination of the hole against the axis of the dies structure, to decides the acceptability of the dies for use. The proposed algorithm has been implemented using a cheap 640${ imes}$480 image system and has shown an average size error of 1micron when measuring the dieses having 0.1mm to 1.0mm diameters. It can be applied to the inspection of the size and position of holes in PCB, too.