Most current machine vision systems for industrial inspection were developed with one specific task in mind. Hence, these systems are inflexible in the sense that they cannot easily be adapted to other applications. In this paper, a general vision system framework has been developed that can be easily adapted to a variety of industrial web inspection problems. The objective of this system is to automatically locate and identify \"defects\" on the surface of the material being inspected. This framework is designed to be robust, to be flexible, and to be as computationally simple as possible. To assure robustness this framework employs a combined strategy of top-down and bottom-up control, hierarchical defect models, and uncertain reasoning methods. To make this framework flexible, a modular Blackboard framework is employed. To minimize computational complexity the system incorporates a simple multi-thresholding segmentation scheme, a fuzzy logic focus of attention mechanism for scene analysis operations, and a partitioning if knowledge that allows concurrent parallel processing during recognition.cognition.