In this paper, we consider a performance improvement of neural network for predicting defect size of steam generator tube using early stopping. Usually, neural network is trained until MSE becomes less than a prescribed error goal. The smaller the error goal, the greater the prediction performance for the trained data. However, as the error goal is decreased, an over fitting is likely to start during supervised training of a neural network, which usually deteriorates the generalization performance. We propose that, for the prediction of an axisymmetric defect size, early stopping can be used to avoid the over-fitting. Through various experiments on the axisymmetric defect samples, we found that the difference bet ween the prediction error of neural network based on early stopping and that of ideal neural network is reasonably small. This indicates that the error goal used for neural network training for the prediction of defect size can be efficiently selected by early stopping.