In manufacture of precise optical products, it is important to inspect and classify the potential defects existing on the products surfaces after precise machining in order to obtain high quality in both functionality and aesthetics. The existing methods for detecting and classifying defects all are low accuracy or efficiency or high cost in inspection process. In this paper, a new inspection system based on machine vision has been introduced, which uses automatic focusing and image mosaic technologies to rapidly acquire distinct surface image, and employs Case-Based Reasoning(CBR)method in defects classification. A modificatory fuzzy similarity algorithm in CBR has been adopted for more quick and robust need of pattern recognition in practice inspection. Experiments show that the system can inspect surface diameter of 500mm in half an hour with resolving power of 0.8μm diameter according to digs or 0.5μm transverse width according to scratches. The proposed inspection principles and methods not only have meet manufacturing requirements of precise optical products, but also have great potential applications in other fields of precise surface inspection.