This paper presents a vision based object width measurement method and its application where the light sectioning method is employed. The target object for measurement is a tread, which is the most outside component of an automobile tire. The entire system applying the measurement method consists of two processes, i.e. a calibration process and a detection process. The calibration process is to identify the relationships between a camera plane and a laser plane, and to estimate a camera lens distortion parameters. As the process requires a test pattern, namely a jig, which is elaborately manufactured. In the detection process, first of all, the region that a laser light illuminates is extracted by applying an adaptive thresholding technique where the distribution of the pixel brightness is considered to decide the optimal threshold. Then, a thinning algorithm is applied to the region so that the ends and the shoulders of a tread are detected. Finally, the tread width and the shoulder width are computed using the homography and the distortion coefficients obtained by the calibration process.